IntelligentEngine: our vision for the future of aircraft power

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IntelligentEngine: our vision for the future of aircraft power

IntelligentEngine: our vision for the future of aircraft power

Our IntelligentEngine vision is simple: better thinking leads to better, more efficient engines and services. Here’s how we’re achieving it.

For the last 100 years, the history of civil aviation has run parallel with the history of Rolls-Royce. In 1919, for example, our Eagle engines powered the Vickers Vimy that carried two intrepid British aviators – John Alcock and Arthur Brown – across the skies in the first non-stop transatlantic flight.

Today, the Trent XWB is the world’s most efficient large aero engine, with fuel savings of $2.9m (per-year, per-plane, over previous-generation engines). And every 13 seconds, somewhere around the globe, a Trent-powered aircraft is either taking off or landing.

We’re now poised to enter a potentially new age of aviation – one in which electric systems increasingly emerge and gas turbines become even more efficient. Our IntelligentEngine vision will not only address civil aviation’s immediate needs but will also anticipate the future demands of air transportation and passenger travel.

IntelligentEngine vision

Since launching in 2018, the idea of the IntelligentEngine has brought together varying strands of Rolls-Royce expertise – from product engineering to aftermarket services, all underpinned by the transformative potential of digital technology. It’s enabled us to improve the way we provide power to our customers. From developing automated robots that crawl through engines to make assessments and diagnose problems, or designing, testing, and maintaining engines in the digital sphere, the IntelligentEngine philosophy runs through every aspect of our business.

As Phil Curnock, our Chief Engineer – Civil Future Programmes, explains: “The IntelligentEngine is really about bringing our computing capability and data together to enhance value for our customers.”

Supercharged with digital advancements

Supercharged with digital advancements

Our IntelligentEngine vision is one that sees engines that are connected, contextually aware, and capable of comprehension.

These engines will be linked to others in an ever-evolving ecosystem. This allows us to sense and respond to changes in the operating environment, and through big data unlock a host of operational efficiencies for airlines.

Jacqui Sutton, Rolls-Royce, Chief Customer Officer – Civil Aerospace, explains that the IntelligentEngine vision will help to meet the challenges of the ever-increasing demand from customers for more efficient operations.

“We are determined to pioneer the power that matters for our customers, and our IntelligentEngine vision will allow us to do this,” she says. “We have the right people, the right skills, and the right infrastructure to grasp this opportunity and deliver world-beating products and services, helping us to deliver even greater value for our customers.”

The vision of the IntelligentEngine covers five broad areas of inter-connected innovation: digital and data; aircraft availability and smart maintenance; product innovation and advanced manufacturing; and new technologies such as electrification or alternative fuels.

Digital and data

Digital and data

Innovative digital technology is the pivot upon which the IntelligentEngine exists. It pervades everything, from product and Care services to enhanced flight efficiency, safety, and aircraft availability. It’s also helped us transform digital manufacturing, realise the value of ‘smart factories’ and unlock insights from engine usage analysis.

At the heart of this is Big Data. Rolls-Royce has long been at the forefront of extracting data from multiple sources and converting that into valuable information.

Today, as Stuart Hughes, our Chief Digital Officer, acknowledges, these insights can now help our customers in their quest to become more efficient. This might mean keeping an engine on wing longer, use less fuel, or fly even more safely. In short, enable better and smarter business operations.

“Some of the things we’re doing now are really technical,” Hughes says. “Really on the edge of physics. So simulation and modelling are important tools for us.”

Digital Twin technology is one aspect of this. Virtual replicas of physical devices, entities or products, Digital Twins allow us to model a greater number of potential circumstances than physical engine tests would ever tolerate. This in turn results in a better understanding and greater efficiencies for our customers.

“The Digital Twin is crucial to Rolls-Royce,” explains Hughes. “A lot of companies say they do this, but we actually get to live it. So the IntelligentEngine as a concept really helps us to focus our resources, our skills and our people on the right things – the magic is when you understand the outcome.”

Aircraft availability and smart maintenance

Aircraft availability and smart maintenance

“Availability to us,” explains Lee McConnellogue, Rolls-Royce – SVP Availability Services, “is ensuring that every time an airline wants to use their aircraft and fly their passengers, it is available.”

This means using smart technology to work as near as possible to 100% availability for our engines. This goes way beyond reactive maintenance and traditional ideas of predicting when engines will need servicing.

One example already fully functional is Airline Support Teams using operational data to work alongside our customers to ensure flight delays and cancellations are reduced.

“We’ve actually become a true service provider, someone who's integrated into the airline, understands their operations and is delivering all aspects of it right the way through the value chain,” says McConnellogue.

The super-connected IntelligentEngine roadmap will also benefit from robotic technology that, just a few years ago, would have existed only in the realm of science fiction. We are developing a snake robot that can work its way through an engine like an endoscope to deposit SWARM robots that crawl through the insides of the engine and perform a visual inspection of hard-to-reach areas.

“The SWARM robot and other robotic assets give us new ways of actually getting inside engines so that we can inspect and repair things that we couldn’t do traditionally,” adds On-Wing Technology Specialist (Robotic Inspections) James Kell.

Kell points out that this vision needs invention to come to life: “There are no off-the-shelf robotic systems available. Therefore, we've had to design them from scratch. And in order to do that we've had to tap into a range of highly skilled and dedicated people. We are working with The University of Nottingham to develop a suite of customised robotic solutions that can help improve service and reduce costly disruptions for our customers.”

Product innovation and advanced manufacturing

Product innovation and advanced manufacturing

Over the next decade, the need for further gains in fuel efficiency will become even more pressing within civil aviation. Which is why our UltraFan® engine is such a compelling proposition. When it’s available during the second half of the 2020s it will be 25% more fuel efficient than the first generation of Trent engines.

This is a significant step-change in engine architecture, with the inclusion of a gearbox at the heart of the engine. The Power Gearbox is designed to let the shafts at the core of the engine run at very high speeds while allowing the fan at the front of the engine to run at a slower speed. UltraFan will further unlock the capabilities of the gas turbine to deliver the more efficient power that global air travel requires. These gains in performance require real innovation as Phil Curnock explains: “Putting that power-dense a gearbox into the middle of the engine is something new. No one’s ever done that before.”

These significant developments have all been underpinned by the innovative digital technology that characterises the IntelligentEngine. For Phil Curnock and the team, testing the UltraFan gearbox in virtual reality (VR) has provided engineers with a more comprehensive understanding of how it will work.

“The team hadn’t assembled that style of gearbox before,” he says. “We tried it out in VR a number of times. The first time there were clashes, things didn’t quite work. But over time we learned what would work thanks to VR.”

This inventive vision of the future extends to all elements of the engine. Pioneering ways to make the 30,000 components of a typical engine lighter and more efficient is a 365-days-a-year operation. Alongside smart factories, the Internet of Things and 3D printing (additive layer manufacturing – ALM) are making manufacturing more economical and cost-effective.

The journey to electrification

The journey to electrification

As Rolls-Royce continues its decades-old drive to improve the sustainability of aviation by striving to enable ever more clean and sustainable power, we explore all technologies with the potential to deliver exciting benefits, such as, among others, electrification. And so, while we continue to ensure that our current engines become even more efficient, Rolls-Royce is also blazing a trail towards hybrid-electric and fully electric solutions.

Rob Watson, Director of Rolls-Royce Electrical, says the company is partnering, collaborating, and innovating on a number of electric propulsion projects.

“There’s growing demand for electrification everywhere we provide products today,” he explains. “So anchored around our core technologies, we’ve got a great opportunity to introduce new electrical systems that optimise the performance of our current products and open up new markets for the future.”

One project that Watson champions is ACCEL, a single-seater demonstrator project that will make an attempt on the world speed record for an all-electric aircraft in late spring 2020. “At the other end of the power spectrum, we have E-FanX where we're collaborating with Airbus to deliver megawatt levels of power,” Watson says.

E-FanX aims to mount an electric motor to a BAE 146 regional jet to investigate hybrid-electrical city hopper flights.

Taken together, these developments will be transformational in how we think about aviation. And our IntelligentEngine vision is at the heart of these step-changes.

“The IntelligentEngine is about the way we combine Product and Services technology with digital capability to add value for our customers,” Curnock concludes. “That could be in the way we support the engine and optimise the operation of it, or it could be in (engine) development, by removing expensive tests because we can now do them analytically by computer. It turns up in a lot of different ways and different new products.”

By utilising the cutting-edge of digital technology and innovation and harnessing it to the furthest reaches of human ingenuity and imagination, we’ll ensure that the world’s air transport and travel needs are answered. Because pioneering the power that matters is our ambition for the next 100 years of civil aviation – and beyond.

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