Rolls Royce – Gas Turbine Aero-engines and their (environmental) challenges
Last night I attended a really interesting talk about Gas Turbine Aero-engines. Dr Paul Withey, Rolls-Royce Group plc, outlined the environmental challenges that Rolls Royce is facing in the development of aero-engines. They have to reduce CO2 and NOX emissions while also reducing the levels of noise caused by the engine. Fuel efficiency seems to be the main market driver as it is outweighing the original engine cost (from a customer point of view).
Anyway, Dr Paul Withey stressed that Rolls Royce has agreed to these environmental targets and that these result in very exciting challenges for the engineers in the company.
Another aspect of the talk focussed on the materials science and manufacturing process aspects when developing and building aero-engines and in particular their interrelation. As I am teaching the Materials Forming Module this year, I was very excited having somebody at UNNC presenting such a demanding case from an industrial perspective.
Finally, I would like to thank Paul very much for taking an additional half an hour to meet our Mechanical Engineering Students in a special Q&A session organised as part of their Materials Forming Module.
