This is the new giant Rolls-Royce engine for airplanes, it is called Ultrafan and it wants to achieve more efficient flights than ever.
The manufacturer Rolls-Royce is certainly known for its legendary (and very expensive) cars, but also for its manufacturing division of engines for the aerospace industry, both military and civil.
The company claims to have 16,000 of these engines in service on military aircraft and another 13,000 engines on commercial aircraft, an area in which now They seek to go further with the creation of the Ultrafan, a gigantic 3.7 meter diameter motor – in the conceptual image you can see the difference – that is proposed as a particularly efficient solution for the future.
Carbon fiber as a key element
One of the keys to this gigantic engine is the use of carbon fiber blades made by robots: the development of these robots has been crucial to that process, and in fact Rolls-Royce has been perfecting them for nearly 10 years.
The development of these blades with this material responds to the needs of an industry that is receiving great pressure to reduce its environmental impact. According to Rolls-Royce 37,000 new aircraft will be needed in the next 20 years more efficient than ever for passenger transport, and the company wants its engines to be an integral part of many of those aircraft.
Carbon fiber allows a saving of the weight of the motor of 20%, something important when it comes to achieving greater efficiency. Alan Newby, responsible for this development, explained that “we have come a long way, but the challenge is to decouple the growth in emissions from the growth in air traffic.”
Although Rolls-Royce and other manufacturers are working on electric and hybrid propulsion systems for airplanes, for those long-haul aircrafts the only option at the moment remains the use of jet engines.
The small iterative improvements they are making to the motors are the key: although the advances are perhaps small in a technology that has been in development for decades, every little step helps those motors become more and more efficient. Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at Teal Group, indicated that “the evolutionary changes do not seem very impressive – a 10% reduction here, a 12% there – but in the airline business with such small margins, that is the difference between the life and death “.
Supersonic Aircraft Engines Give New Ideas
There are other interesting projects underway such as that of the Reaction Engines company, which with its Saber engine wants to re-launch a very special market niche: that of supersonic aircraft. That engine, in fact, raises flights at Mach 5, which would be twice the speed of the Concordes.
One of the problems this development faces is the temperature at which the air enters the engine: can reach 1,000 ° C, which would destroy the motor.
In Reaction Engines they have created a refrigeration system that allows to keep these temperatures under control, and that “pre-cooler” made from small 1mm thick tubes through which a coolant circulates is also being used by Rolls-Royce for its developments.
