Jewel in the crown: Rolls-Royce’s single-crystal turbine blade casting foundry

Casting is one of the oldest and most basic methods of metalworking. If you can make a fire hot enough to melt a metal, and manufacture a crucible to melt it in and a mould that can withstand the heat, you can cast complex metal forms; and we’ve been doing it for millennia. The oldest-known casting is a copper frog made 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Many of the gleaming marble sculptures of Ancient Greece are in fact more recent Roman copies of originals that had been cast in bronze: the few surviving originals, such as the Riace Bronzes of Greek warriors found in the sea off Sicily, show the incredible sophistication and level of detail achieved by these long-dead masters of metals.

Yet this most ancient of skills is still in use today, and indeed is still being developed. Its most recent incarnation is arguably the most advanced procedure that has ever been undertaken in metals, and is vital for one of the emblematic activities of the modern world: routine air travel. It is to be found in the UK’s historic centre of metalworking, Sheffield, at the Rolls-Royce Advanced Blade Casting Facility (ABCF), a facility purpose built near Sheffield University’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Rotherham.