Accelerating Turbofan Structural Design

Ross Atherton, Future Programmes Team Lead – Structural Systems Design at Rolls-Royce presents at the UK Altair Technology Conference 2022.

Modern aerospace gas turbine engines are some of the most complex and highly-integrated machines on the planet. With huge responsibility on the aviation industry to reach a carbon neutral position in the coming years the engineering challenge isn’t getting any easier. This presentation covers industry and design trends and highlights the design challenges of the Rolls-Royce UltraFan® engine; a next generation gas turbine designed to introduce a step reduction in fuel burn, emissions, noise, and operating costs.

Weight comes at a premium in aerospace, and the second half of this presentation goes into detail on how Rolls-Royce have deployed the Altair Hyperworks toolset to enhance the structural efficiency of the UltraFan® engine, covering: rapid model and mesh creation; new insights from structural optimisation and robust design; integrated post-processing; and the resulting acceleration of the engineering design iteration cycle.