Customer Stories： Sir Colin Humphreys on the Rolls Royce turbine technology and the Phenom SEM

This department has a Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre, which I founded with Rolls-Royce in 1994. And we then had a small grant from Rolls-Royce, and it's just grown and grown since then. And it's now a major centre here. And basically, Rolls-Royce is one of the leading aerospace companies in the world. It makes aerospace engines. It used to make cars as well, but it makes aerospace engines. And when I started working with Rolls-Royce, they were number three in the world. There was General Electric was number one, Pratt & Whitney number two, and then Rolls-Royce. And now it's GE number one, Rolls-Royce number two, Pratt & Whitney number three. And that's largely due to improved materials in the engines. And materials that we've developed in this department are now flying in Rolls-Royce engines, and they're helping them to be much more efficient. And we work particularly on turbine blades, but not only turbine blades. We work on compressor blades as well. And electron microscopy, again, is essential for looking at the atomic structure of these materials. And sometimes they'll fail, and we've got a material here. And first of all, we look at the surfaces, because you can look at surface cracks or something. And again, scanning electron microscopy is really important for that. But we have now a massive training centre here. We train lots of people from Rolls-Royce to work with them, and for Rolls-Royce suppliers. So a good question is, what limits the efficiency of a Rolls-Royce engine? And the answer is the temperature at which it operates. So it turns out, it's the law of thermodynamics, in fact. The higher the temperature you can operate, the more efficient the engine. And the engine is therefore limited by the efficiency of the materials we use. So we're looking at blue sky, and it's really very basic research. We're looking at materials people have never looked at before, new materials. We're doing different alloying, different compositions. We're just trying to find materials which are really strong at high temperatures. They've got to be able to withstand air strikes, for example. Everyone knows, generally, an air can fly to an engine, and if it breaks up, it's a disaster. So these have to be really strong materials. They have to operate at really high temperatures. And then we consume much less fuel, so they're more fuel-efficient. And also higher temperatures mean there's less emissions, so less carbon emissions. And we're being very successful here, and work with Rolls-Royce strongly. And our materials will continue to be next-generation Rolls-Royce engines.