Quantum project unlocks accelerated run times for giant air flow calculations

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Quantum project unlocks accelerated run times for giant air flow calculations

28 November 2025

Rolls-Royce, Xanadu and Riverlane have unlocked future opportunities to greatly accelerate large simulations of air flowing through jet engines using quantum computing.

Together, the partners have shown how to cut simulation run times from weeks to less than an hour, by integrating Rolls-Royce test simulations into Xanadu's PennyLane software and Riverlane's state-of-the-art quantum algorithms.

Simulating airflow – called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – is important for designing components in jet engines. It is currently carried out using classical supercomputers, but the required enormous calculations, can take months to complete. However, quantum computers are poised to offer a significant speed advantage, potentially accelerating the simulation time exponentially, leading to much faster design processes for large systems.

Leigh Lapworth, Rolls-Royce Fellow, Computational Science said:

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This has been a hugely successful collaboration, which has significantly advanced our quantum applications capability. The single-minded focus on fault tolerant quantum algorithms has put us and our partners in a leading position as we enter the error-corrected era.”


Christoph Sünderhauf, Staff Quantum Scientist at Riverlane, said:

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To solve problems on a quantum computer, certain parameters of the quantum circuit need to be precomputed classically. This process was traditionally very time-consuming. However, our research, along with that of academic groups, has significantly accelerated this step, enabling the classical preprocessing to keep pace with the quantum computation itself.”

Christian Weedbrook, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Xanadu said:

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Our efforts here successfully reduced prototyping runtimes by up to 1000-fold in some instances, overcoming the unsustainable wait times of weeks for Rolls-Royce. To make quantum simulations, and more generally quantum computing, practical for Rolls-Royce, we targeted their specific application and used our Catalyst compiler to optimize their PennyLane programs.

Our work highlights a critical truth for industrial quantum adoption: bottlenecks won't be solved by isolating quantum from classical computing. We must focus on optimizing the hybrid quantum-classical structure to make these applications present a computational advantage.”

This collaboration, supported through joint funding between the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, demonstrates a maturing partnership for building quantum computing expertise between the two nations. Each company brought their own specialised skills and capabilities: Rolls-Royce provided quantum applications expertise and developed the compiled workflows; Riverlane contributed novel quantum algorithms; and Xanadu provided optimisations to the quantum-classical program written using PennyLane, highlighting the effectiveness of its Catalyst compiler. The collaboration benefited from leveraging a wide pool of expertise to effectively target the end-to-end prototyping process.

About Rolls-Royce Holdings plc
  1. Rolls-Royce is a force for progress; powering, protecting and connecting people everywhere. Our products and service packages help our customers meet the growing need for power across multiple industries; enable governments to equip their armed forces with the power required to protect their citizens; and connect people, societies, cultures and economies together.
  2. Rolls-Royce has a local presence in 48 countries and customers in over a hundred more, including airlines and aircraft leasing companies, armed forces and navies, and marine and industrial customers.
  3. Through our multi-year transformation programme, we are building a high-performing, competitive, resilient and growing Rolls-Royce. We are building the financial capacity and agility to allow us to successfully develop and deliver the products that will support our customers through the energy transition.
  4. Annual underlying revenue was £17.8 billion in 2024, and underlying operating profit was £2.46 billion.
  5. Rolls-Royce Holdings plc is a publicly traded company (LSE: RR., ADR: RYCEY, LEI: 213800EC7997ZBLZJH69)

www.rolls-royce.com

About Riverlane

Riverlane is the world leader in Quantum Error Correction (QEC), the technology that unlocks quantum computing’s promise of a new age of human progress.

We partner with over 60% of the world’s quantum computer companies and leading high-performance computing (HPC) centres, to solve the error problem blocking their path to ‘utility-scale’ systems that can transform multiple industries.

Deltaflow, our real-time QEC stack, is interoperable with quantum computers using any qubit modality. It utilises proprietary QEC chips, decoders, and compilers. Deltakit, our software platform, helps quantum developers learn, develop and adopt QEC.

Founded in 2016 as a spin-out from Cambridge University, Riverlane is headquartered in Cambridge and has offices in Boston in the US. The company has over $120 million in private funding, including an $85 million Series C round in 2024.

About Xanadu

Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world's leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development. Visit xanadu.ai or follow us on X @XanaduAI.

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