Rolls-Royce officially inaugurated its new £110 million Advanced Blade Casting Facility (ABCF) during a ceremony by UK Business Minister Mat...
When fully operational in 2017, the 150,000 sq ft (14,000 sq m) facility in Rotherham will employ 150 people and have the capacity to manufacture more than 100,000 single crystal turbine blades a year, for the Trent aero engine family.
The ABCF will have ground-breaking automated manufacturing techniques including integrated wax fabrication lines, 3D structured light inspection, which measures the entire surface of components and computed tomography (CT), which has the ability to measure deep into the blade’s internal structure.
These techniques have helped reduce the time it takes to manufacture a turbine blade by 50% while producing a step-change in component performance. This state of the art facility makes use of manufacturing methods developed within Rolls-Royce and at the Manufacturing Technology Centre, Ansty, near Coventry.
Some of the £15m investment by the UK Government was used by Rolls-Royceto develop these techniques.
There are two types of turbine blade manufactured at the Rotherham facility: high pressure (HP) and intermediate pressure (IP) single crystal blades. There are 182 turbine blades of these types in each Trent XWB engine. One HP turbine blade extracts around 1000 horsepower from the gas flow towards the rear of the engine, which is equivalent to the power of a Formula 1 racing car, to drive the engine’s compressors.
Each blade is approximately 10cm in height and 300g in weight and goes through 200 processes before it is ready to be installed.
