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Tuesday 28 July 2020 09:59 AM

Welcome to the future

Rolls-Royce is a pioneer in aviation, committed to delivering new levels of efficiency and sustainability. To see this pioneering spirit in action you only need to spend time at the Aerospace Integration Research Centre (AIRC) at Cranfield University where some of our most creative thinkers are coming up with the answers to a variety of aviation’s biggest future challenges.

One of the solutions that our systems architects have created is the Future Systems Simulator (FSS), and while it may look like a giant games console, it’s actually one of the cleverest pieces of digital technology that we have developed to support our research into the future of flight.

The FSS provides a flight deck platform that allows future propulsion systems, controls and services to be flown in a virtual environment. The simulation of existing and next-generation aircraft systems on the FSS gives us the potential to maximise gas turbine integration opportunities and take our use of data to the next level.

Customers are already engaging with us to exploit this capability and the simulator will support near-term product opportunities as well as facilitating the market to move to single-pilot crewing and our research into propulsion system electrification.

The FSS works across all three pillars of our Civil Aerospace sustainability strategy that focuses on optimising the gas turbine, improving power system and aircraft integration, and exploring novel propulsion technologies such as electrification. By taking our use of data to the next level, it also feeds into our over-arching Engine vision, where the worlds of product, service and digital technology become increasingly inseparable.

Integrate and collaborate

Peter Beecroft, a systems architect at Rolls-Royce, explains that the days of independent optimisation of airframe and propulsion are coming to an end: “We are already beginning to see technologies which capitalise on better airframe-engine integration and these technologies are going to become increasingly important in the future. Therefore, our ability to develop these to offer as technology collaborations with our airframe partners will become ever more essential.”

At Cranfield we collaborate with industry partners such as Airbus to put ourselves in the shoes of our airline customers, ask ourselves what it is they will want from an aircraft in the future, and then go to work trying to find solutions for architectures that may not be a reality for at least a decade or more.

Some of the key areas of research include further integration of engine on-wing and pylon, reducing the weight of the powerplant system, and understanding the best use of electric offtake in an aircraft. All of which will lead to our ultimate goal of delivering better efficiency across the airframe.

In addition, as engines for widebody aircraft get bigger, with larger fan blades and fan cases, the challenge of attaching them to the aircraft pylon is going to get harder. Rolls-Royce, for example, has started manufacture of the world’s largest fan blades, for its UltraFan^® demonstrator engine that will set new standards in efficiency and sustainability. As a set, the composite blades have a 140-inch diameter, which is almost the size of a current narrowbody fuselage. Although this is a scalable product, integrating these at full size onto the wing of an aircraft is something that can be explored with the FSS in a virtual environment.

Beecroft also explains how the FSS is helping in the development of systems for airframe platforms with a high degree of electrification, including Rolls-Royce projects such as eVTOL and ACCEL: “The aerospace world is experiencing a renaissance of creativity when it comes to designing hybrid and electric platforms, with a bewildering array of concepts and equally diverse concepts for power and propulsion systems. In many of the more novel proposals, the propulsion system becomes an integral part of flight control and so, as a provider of such systems, our ability to simulate these systems and test their behaviour becomes critical.”

So how do we develop systems for the management of such a broad range of concepts, potentially when many of them won’t make it off the drawing board? Luckily with drawing boards being digital these days they won’t have to do so. Many of the models developed can be imported, either directly or as behavioural characteristics, into the modular software architecture of the FSS.

The here and now

It is worth noting, however, that the technologies being developed on the FSS are not necessarily all about future platforms – they can also help provide better understanding of the interactions between the pilots and current gas turbine systems, provide additional information on gas turbine performance and behaviour rather than the current standard indicators, and generate better information to optimise use of an engine to match a particular mission – whether that be minimising fuel burn or maximising engine life.

“Because of the highly flexible nature of the touchscreen-enabled FSS, as well as the modular nature of the software, we can represent existing platforms such as the Airbus A350 or Boeing 787 to a good fidelity,” says Beecroft. “With accurate representations of aircraft platforms and their systems we can investigate integration of engines into the aircraft, doing this in advance of any real-world integration or flight testing, ensuring the quality of such testing is greatly improved.”

This capability takes our use of data to a new level – we are already industry leaders in our use of the world’s most sophisticated Engine Health Monitoring (EHM) on the Pearl family of engines – but the FSS takes this one step further by delivering Enhanced Cockpit Decision Making (ECDM) flight deck application solutions.

ECDM applications aim to address current issues caused by the fact that engine displays on the flight deck have changed little in decades, often displaying digital indications of a select few engine parameters that used to be analogue dials. ECDM gives the pilots greater contextual awareness of the condition of an aircraft's powerplants, enabling the flight crew to make better quality and more informed decisions, especially under challenging scenarios.

Real service examples of this include surge events where engines have been shut down before they have had chance to recover, or bird strike events where the incorrect engine has been shut down. ECDM does not just apply to engine events; even simply ensuring the engines are given sufficient warm-up time prior to take-off can have an important role in extending on-wing life and the efficiency of our products.

The FSS is a great example of our IntelligentEngine vision coming to life as the platform enhances the ability of our engines to become more and more connected, comprehending and contextually aware. Welcome to the future of flight.