Engines

Quiet engine with power to spare

An aircraft is only as good as its engines and the operating costs have a considerable influence on the profitability of the complete aircraft. How the aircraft is perceived by the airport’s neighbours depends on its ecological performance. For engineers it is repeatedly a special challenge to design a jet engine which comes as close as possible to satisfying all the requirements. They combine tried and tested technology with new design principles. The result is a unique high-tech product.

For the Airbus A380 worldwide only two manufacturers supply jet engines: Rolls-Royce in Great Britain and the Engine Alliance, a consortium of the well-known American manufacturers, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney. el newslink special 14 As a rule the development of an aircraft takes five years, the development of the jet engine to be installed in it requires ten years.

For its A380 fleet, with the Trent 900 jet engine from the British manufacturer Rolls-Royce, Lufthansa has chosen a particularly quiet and economical propulsion unit. The engine is a further development of the Trent 700, which first went into operation in 1995 with the A330 and, since then, has already proved its reliability for the airlines in over a million flying hours.

The new mega-liner A380 needs the enormous thrust of four times 70.000 pounds in order to get its take-off weight of 560 tons into the air. In doing so, the new mega-Airbus causes considerably less noise emission than Technical masterpiece: The Rolls-Royce Trent 900 jet engine. the Boeing 747, even though its start weight is about 40 percent higher.

The most common and effective measure of the manufacturers aimed at decreasing jet engine noise, is the increase in the so-called bypass ratio. This means that the jet engine is designed so that more air flows past the propulsion turbine. But this improvement also has undesired consequences: the greater diameter of such a jet engine causes greater air resistance and a higher weight. The solution for the Trent engine was a happy medium: the diameter of the jet engines was only moderately increased (to 2.95 m) and a lighter housing material was used, namely titanium.