Engineered4Extremes - In Focus

A jet engine fan blade the size of a small dining table sounds impossible to build from carbon fibre. Rolls-Royce built it anyway. At its composite technology centre in Bristol, Rolls-Royce manufactures the fan blade set for UltraFan, the world's largest civil aero-engine fan, tested at the company's Derby facility. Each blade combines carbon fibre composite construction with a titanium leading edge, tough enough to survive a bird strike at altitude, while ceramic matrix composite components elsewhere in the engine withstand turbine temperatures conventional metals cannot. The result is projected to deliver up to a 25% improvement in fuel efficiency over earlier Trent-generation engines. It is composite engineering doing a metal engine's job, at a scale nobody has previously attempted.