Centres of excellence: inside Rolls-Royce's UTCs

When Rolls-Royce’s next generation jet engine, the UltraFan, enters service, a global network of university researchers will share the credit.

To pick just one component, the steel shaft on the UltraFan owes much to materials research done in Cambridge University. Indeed, such is the academics’ contribution that Mark Jefferies, the company’s Chief of University Research Liaison, says that it would be hard to pin down areas in the new engine where academics didn’t play a role. “A lot of our tools, our analysis codes, most of CFD [computational fluid dynamics], were initially created and continue to be developed in collaboration between our own engineers and the academics.”

The academics behind the technology work in a series of University Technology Centres (UTC) that Rolls-Royce has assembled to research key technologies. The centres have made important contributions across a number of areas. For instance, they contributed greatly to the materials used in today’s products with researchers at Swansea University, for example, working on the exotic hot-end titanium and nickel alloys throughout the firm’s Trent engines.