Rolls-Royce's engine of growth: Famous firm is banking on Trent XWB to propel revival
Anyone who believes Britain is a post-industrial nation and that the City reigns supreme should be frogmarched onto a train to Derby and plonked in front of Rolls-Royce’s Trent XWB engine.
The Trent XWB, designed for Airbus’s A350 long-haul jet, is being developed in a facility on the outskirts of the East Midlands city, that gives few clues to the engineering marvel that lies within.
To enter one of the 40ft test beds, visitors are guided down a clanking metal staircase and through the ‘void’ – the empty space surrounding the test bed itself to cut down on noise.
As part of the testing, the engine will be pelted with hail and have dead birds thrown at it.
‘When you have a jet engine of this size, to some it is beautiful, to some it is amazingly complicated,’ says Simon Burr, programme director for the Trent XWB. ‘To me, it is bringing together numerous skills, people, intellect, and creative energy.’
The Trent XWB is quite simply huge: the fan case is wider than the fuselage of Concorde.
The blades in the turbine operate at temperatures that can exceed 2000C, well above their melting point, so each has tiny air holes, smaller than a human hair, in it so that ‘cooling air’ – at 700C – can be blown through.
To cope with the heat and the pressure, the 68 turbine blades are made of a nickel-based alloy and are grown from a single crystal to make them stronger. The engines weigh over 16,000lbs and have more than 20,000 parts.
The Trent XWB programme is crucial to Rolls. After a decade of pretty much unbroken success, Rolls has hit a rocky patch.
The company is being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for alleged corruption in Indonesia and other Asian markets.
Chief executive John Rishton has issued two profit warnings this year and the company has announced 2,600 job losses – the most prominent of which was former finance director Mark Morris, who has taken the rap for poor communication with investors.
Analysts at Investec have even gone so far as to publish an inflammatory note suggesting the company should break itself up to restore investor confidence, spinning off or selling its aerospace business.
The City has fallen out of love with the shares, which have fallen by a third in the past 12 months.
Amid the gloom, it is easy to forget that the company has a £70bn order book, of which £30bn is for the Trent XWB. To put those numbers in perspective, the entire market capitalisation of Barclays bank is around £38billion.
‘It (the XWB) is absolutely synonymous with the future success of this business and it is one of the key growth drivers behind our aerospace growth outlook,’ says Tony Wood, the firm’s president of aerospace.
The engine is designed to fly very long routes, up to 8,300 nautical miles, so will potentially open up new markets.
Compared with the first generation of Trent engines in the mid 1990s, the XWB will be 16-17 per cent more fuel efficient, a huge saving for airlines. The aircraft has been tested all around the world, in temperatures between -40C to +45C, in locations from La Paz, Bolivia, to Manitoba in Canada. ‘This aircraft is very quiet, which I think is a good thing unless you are sat next to someone very boring,’ says Burr.
By the end of next year Rolls plans to deliver at least two engines a week, and that will accelerate to one every working day by 2017. Eric Schulz, president of civil large engines, says the firm will have more than 50 per cent of the widebody planes market.
The sale of an engine is not a one-off event but works like an annuity, since customers normally enter a long-term maintenance contract.
Once aloft, the engine’s health is monitored so Rolls can spot faults and head them off.
The company four years ago made a strategic equity investment in university spin-out Oxford BioSignals, which started out trying to predict the onset of heart attacks and whose technology can analyse data from multiple sensors on an aircraft engine.
‘Why did we partner with them? It is all about maths,’ says Tony Wood. ‘On a jet engine you are streaming many channels of data.We can then feed those signals through this software and that engine health monitoring system. That is what keeps us sleeping at night. That’s what you get when you buy a Rolls-Royce engine.’
Rolls is depending on the Trent XWB to drive a recovery in 2015 and help restore its reputation – but its success is also crucial to Derby, to the supply chain and to British engineering.
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