̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Howard Stone

Strategic partner: Rolls-Royce

skbf2 — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 16:48:25 +0000

Researchers at Cambridge are working with Rolls-Royce to make aeroengines greener.

Engineering atoms inside the jet engine: the Great British Take Off

lw355 — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 07:30:21 +0000

Inside a jet engine is one of the most extreme environments known to engineering.

In less than a second, a tonne of air is sucked into the engine, squeezed to a fraction of its normal volume and then passed across hundreds of blades rotating at speeds of up to 10,000 rpm; reaching the combustor, the air is mixed with kerosene and ignited; the resulting gases are about a third as hot as the sun’s surface and hurtle at speeds of almost 1,500 km per hour towards a wall of turbines, where each blade generates power equivalent to the thrust of a Formula One racing car.

Turbine blades made from ‘super’ materials with outstanding properties are needed to withstand these unimaginably challenging conditions – where the temperatures soar to above the melting point of the turbine components and the centrifugal forces are equivalent to hanging a double-decker bus from each blade.

Even with these qualities, the blades require a ceramic layer and an air cooling system to prevent them from melting when the engine reaches its top temperatures. But with ever-increasing demands for greater performance and reduced emissions, the aerospace industry needs engines to run even hotter and faster, and this means expecting more and more from the materials they are made from.

This, says Dr Cathie Rae, is the materials grand challenge. “Turbine blades are made using nickel-based superalloys, which are capable of withstanding the phenomenal stresses and temperatures they need to operate under within the jet engine. But we are running close to their critical limits.”

An alloy is a mixture of metals, such as you might find in steel or brass. A superalloy, however, is a mixture that imparts superior mechanical strength and resistance to heat-induced deformation and corrosion.

Rae is one of a team of scientists in the Rolls-Royce ̽��ֱ�� Technology Centre (UTC) at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. ̽��ֱ��team’s research efforts are focused on extracting the greatest possible performance from nickel-based superalloys, and on designing superalloys of the future.

Current jet engines predominantly use alloys containing nickel and aluminium, which form a strong cuboidal lattice. Within and around this brick-like structure are up to eight other components that form a ‘mortar’. Together, the components give the material its superior qualities.

“Even tiny adjustments in the amount of each component can have a huge effect on the microscopic structure, and this can cause radical changes in the superalloy’s properties,” explains Dr Howard Stone. “It’s rather like adjusting the ingredients in a cake – increasing one ingredient might produce one sought-after property, but at the sake of another. We need to find the perfect chemical recipe.”

Stone is the Principal Investigator overseeing a £50 million Strategic Partnership on structural metallic systems for advanced gas turbine applications funded jointly by Rolls-Royce and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and involving the Universities of Birmingham, Swansea, Manchester, Oxford and Sheffield, and Imperial College London.

̽��ֱ��researchers melt together precise amounts of each of the different elements to obtain a 5cm bar, then exhaustively test the bar’s mechanical properties and analyse its microscopic structure. Their past experience in atomic engineering is vital for homing in on where the incremental improvements might be found – without this, they would need to make many millions of bars to test each reasonable mixture of components.

Now, they are looking beyond the usual components to exotic elements, although always with an eye on keeping costs as low as possible, which means not using extremely rare materials. “ ̽��ֱ��Periodic Table is our playground… we’re picking and mixing elements, guided by our computer models and experimental experience, to find the next generation of superalloys,” he adds.

̽��ֱ��team now have 12 patents with Rolls-Royce. One of the most recent has been in collaboration with Imperial College London, and involves the discovery that the extremely strong matrix structure of nickel-based aluminium superalloys can also be achieved using a mixture of nickel, aluminium, cobalt and tungsten.

“Instead of the cake being flavoured with two main ingredients, we can make it with four,” Stone explains. “This gives the structure even better properties, many of which we are only just discovering.”

“We’ve also been looking at new intermetallic reinforced superalloys using chromium, tantalum and silicon – no nickel at all. We haven’t quite got the final balance to achieve what we want, but we’re working towards it.”

Stone highlights the importance of collaboration between industry and academia: “New alloys typically take 10 years and many millions of pounds to develop for operational components. We simply couldn’t do this work without Rolls-Royce. For the best part of two decades we’ve had a collaboration that links fundamental materials research through to industrial application and commercial exploitation.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Dr Justin Burrows, Project Manager at Rolls-Royce: “Our academic partners understand the materials and design challenges we face in the development of gas turbine technology. Improvements like the novel nickel and steel alloys developed in Cambridge are key to helping us meet these challenges and to maintaining our competitive advantage.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge UTC, which was founded by its Director Professor Sir Colin Humphreys in 1994, is one of a global network of over 30 UTCs. These form part of Rolls-Royce’s £1 billion annual investment in research and development, which also includes the Department of Engineering’s ̽��ֱ�� Gas Turbine Partnership. Rolls-Royce and EPSRC also fund Doctoral Training Centres in Cambridge that help to ensure a continuing supply of highly trained scientists and engineers ready to move into industry.

̽��ֱ��UK aerospace industry is the largest in Europe, with a turnover in 2011 of £24.2 billion; worldwide, it’s second only to that of the USA. Meanwhile, increasing global air traffic is estimated to require 35,000 new passenger aircraft by 2030, worth about $4.8 trillion.

For the researchers, it’s fascinating to see global engineering challenges being solved from the atom up, as Rae explains: “ ̽��ֱ��commercial success of a new engine can be dependent on very small differences in fuel efficiency, which can only be achieved by innovations in materials and design. There’s something really exciting about working at the atomic scale and seeing this translate into innovation with big powerful machines.”

Inset image: Thermo cycling.

̽��ֱ��Periodic Table may not sound like a list of ingredients but, for a group of materials scientists, it’s the starting point for designing the perfect chemical make-up of tomorrow’s jet engines.

Increasing one ingredient might produce one sought-after property, but at the sake of another – we need to find the perfect chemical recipe

Howard Stone

Engineering Atoms

Rolls-Royce Plc

Rotor

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Strategic research partnership drives materials science research and training

lw355 — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:02:53 +0000

Over the next 10 years, a Strategic Partnership in Structural Metallic Systems for Advanced Gas Turbine Applications will develop materials skills and knowledge to support the development of future gas turbines. It builds on a highly successful ̽��ֱ�� Technology Partnership funded by Rolls-Royce between the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham and Swansea.

Fundamental materials research is needed to develop materials that will improve the efficiency and environmental sustainability of gas turbines, which provide the power for many applications including aircraft, ships and electricity generation. Principal Investigator Dr Howard Stone, from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, explained: ‘Dwindling resources and climate change are forcing engineering designers to utilise materials and energy supplies with ever-greater efficiency. One approach is to find materials that withstand gas combusting at higher temperatures, since this uses less energy and creates less CO₂.’

To meet this challenge, the programme brings together a critical mass of researchers to increase the efficiency of known materials or to find new materials that can be used for the hottest parts of the engine. Cambridge’s contribution will be to develop and test new structural metallic materials that will withstand ever more extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, as well as being safe and economical.

̽��ֱ��funding also includes a Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) to help create the next generation of world-class materials scientists and metallurgical engineers. ‘ ̽��ֱ��UK is experiencing a chronic shortage of materials scientists despite a clear industrial need,’ said Dr Cathie Rae, who is coordinating the Cambridge DTP. A total of 60 students across the three universities will undertake research of strategic value to Rolls-Royce and the gas turbine industry in general, as well as taught courses amounting to a year of training. ‘Our goal is to equip scientists of the future with the skills needed to underpin industries as diverse as aeroengineering, nuclear power and construction.’

Rolls-Royce and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will work jointly with the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham and Swansea in a new £50 million strategic partnership.

̽��ֱ��UK is experiencing a chronic shortage of materials scientists despite a clear industrial need.

Dr Cathie Rae

Rolls-Royce

Trent 900

Naked Scientist takes on materials science

̽��ֱ��Rolls-Royce Strategic Partnership includes funds to recruit a new member to the award-winning Naked Scientists team, whose weekly radio programmes and podcasts reach a worldwide audience of more than 20 million people per week.
Working with Naked Scientist Dr Chris Smith, the new team member’s focus will be to publicise materials science research as a means to improving the general perception of metallurgical engineering and to encourage more young people into science and engineering. For more information, please contact Dr Chris Smith (cs222@cam.ac.uk) or visit www.thenakedscientists.com/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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‘Super’ superalloys: hotter, stronger, for even longer

ns480 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:14:53 +0000

A team of over a dozen researchers at the Rolls-Royce Materials UTC in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy has been studying the properties of nickel-base superalloys with the aim of obtaining the very best from their performance. ‘Materials are subjected to incredible conditions in jet engines – the turbine blades, which have walls only a millimetre thick, are whizzing round at 10,000 rpm while gases over 1500ºC pass over their surface,’ explained Deputy Director Dr Howard Stone.

By improving the performance of materials used in these highly demanding environments, jet engines can be run at higher temperatures. And, because this reduces fuel consumption, increasing gas temperatures offers a direct method by which emissions from air travel can also be reduced. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge team conducts research into all aspects of the metallurgy of these materials, from understanding how their properties may be optimised, to ensuring their safety in service, to investigating why failures occur.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Materials UTC was linked five years ago with complementary departments at the Universities of Swansea and Birmingham to form a UTP. ‘ ̽��ֱ��UTPs have been very much admired throughout the world, and other companies globally are beginning to emulate the model of having permanent research centres within universities,’ said senior academic Dr Cathie Rae. ‘It’s about building a relationship of trust between the researchers and the industrial partner to mutual benefit.’

With an eye on the future, the lab is now also working towards the development of novel materials to enable more efficient aeroengines to be realised. ‘We cover the longer range research area that Rolls-Royce needs,’ explained Director Professor Colin Humphreys, who masterminded the original UTC and leads the Cambridge UTP. ‘We’ve helped to develop new alloys that are currently flying in Rolls-Royce-powered aircraft and now we’re developing their successors – the alloys of the future – which will run hotter, stronger, for even longer.’

For more information, please visit www.msm.cam.ac.uk/UTC

Only a single class of engineering materials can withstand the extreme conditions deep within a jet aeroplane engine – the nickel-base superalloys.

It’s about building a relationship of trust between the researchers and the industrial partner to mutual benefit.

Dr Cathie Rae

Rolls-Royce

Engine

Rolls-Royce

Research is the foundation stone for the high-technology products that Rolls-Royce designs and develops for its extremely competitive aerospace, marine and energy businesses. Each market sector sets substantial economic, operational and environmental challenges that call for accurate, long-range, research-based, technology planning.

Rolls-Royce, in collaboration with its partners, spends around £800 million annually on research and development. Its research strategy embraces three ‘Visions’ addressing the 5-, 10- and 20-year timeframes, which broadly are devoted to technology validation, applied research and fundamental research, respectively.

A key element of the longer-range Vision 10 and Vision 20 programmes is the network of Rolls-Royce-supported ̽��ֱ�� Technology Centres (UTCs). Over the past 18 years, some 29 UTCs (20 in the UK, the remainder in Europe, USA and Asia) have been carefully selected as the very best in their fields to address critical technical areas as diverse as materials, noise, combustion, aerodynamics and manufacturing technology. In cases where UTCs are highly complementary in their research focus, they have been linked together to form ̽��ֱ�� Technology Partnerships (UTPs).

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, with which Rolls-Royce has deep and long-established research links, has played a key role in the UTC network through three research programmes:

̽��ֱ��Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Gas Turbine Partnership (UGTP) includes the world-renowned Whittle Laboratory and over 80 projects, such as the Environmentally Friendly Engine (see panel), whose collective purpose is to provide an integrated approach to gas turbine fluid mechanics and thermodynamics.
̽��ֱ��Materials UTC in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy conducts research into high-temperature superalloys used in the hottest components of gas turbine engines (see panel).
̽��ֱ��Engineering Design Centre (EDC) in the Department of Engineering has provided the Engineering Knowledge Management UTC of a wider UTP for Design. ̽��ֱ��project addressed the need to capture, store and retrieve engineering knowledge to improve design processes.

̽��ֱ��UTCs and UTPs are highly regarded as models for effective industrial– academic collaborative research. Their long-term nature and real-world challenges bring mutual benefits: Rolls-Royce finds solutions to complex technical challenges; the universities gain an ongoing five-year stability of funding and a greater depth and quality to their academic research; and the science base is broadened by developing a strong pool of highly skilled engineers and scientists.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes