Narrative
Wide Chord Fan Blades provide a key competitive advantage for Rolls-Royce’s £8.6bn aero-engine business employing 1500 staff. In service, blades experience massive loads and high-frequency vibration, creating the potential for failure. In response to blade-off events on the Trent™ 800 engine, Rolls-Royce (RR) urgently needed a means of inhibiting fatigue crack growth, and selected laser shock peening (LSP). Research in the UoA, elucidating the mechanism and outcomes of LSP, provided critical scientific underpinning for its introduction into the production process for the Trent™ 800 and, subsequently, other engines. Further the UoA now provides manufacturing process QA. Orders for the new Trent™ XWB engine, relying on LSP, exceed £60bn, with partners The Metal Improvement Company establishing dedicated LSP treatment facilities for RR in the UK (with 30 employees) and Singapore.Category of impact | Economic, Technological |
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Impact level | Adoption |
Research Beacons, Institutes and Platforms
- Advanced materials
Documents & Links
Related content
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Research output
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Overview - Residual stress part 2 - Nature and origins
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Effects of fatigue and fretting on residual stresses introduced by laser shock peening
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Residual stress and its role in failure
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Engineering the residual stress state and microstructure of stainless steel with mechanical surface treatments
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Relaxation of residual stress in shot peened Udimet 720Li under high temperature isothermal fatigue
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Residual stress part 1 - Measurement techniques
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Neutron strain scanning using a radially collimated diffracted beam
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review