SILOET II P13 will provide Rolls-Royce with aerodynamic and aero acoustic prediction capabilities for use in multi-disciplinary optimisation design techniques for the challenges of the installed engine associated with future higher bypass ratio engines aircraft concepts for entry into service in 2020 and beyond. These are essential to achieve the ACARE and FlightPath 2050 targets for noise, fuel burn and NOx. Through increased collaboration between UK aircraft noise research teams at the Universities of Southampton, Cambridge, Cranfield and Loughborough, SILOET II P13 will provide a step change in nacelle aerodynamic and aero acoustic modelling capability within the aircraft installed environment validated by high fidelity measured data. Application of this new capability will place Rolls-Royce and its associated UK aerospace supply chains in a position to win a major part of the very large post-2020 high-value civil aircraft market.

Superconducting machines are a means to greatly increase the torque and power density of electrical machines. In order to establish the magnitude of this increase, the partners in the TSB Programmable Superconducting AC Machine or PSAM project (i.e. Cambridge University, EADS Innovation Works, Magnifye, led by Rolls-Royce plc) will design, build and test a demonstrator superconducting machine in which both the stator and rotor are superconducting. The stator will use MgB2 superconductors and the rotor will employ programmable YBCO permanent magnet bulks. Initial indications are that the torque density increase is about 8 compared to conventional (non-superconducting) machines that can provide future benefits in a number of applications including transport, marine and aerospace.

Awaiting Public Project Summary

To reduce climate impact of aviation, decarbonisation is a major challenge. Current combustion chambers are burning hydrocarbon fuels, such as kerosene or more recently emerging SAF products. Hydrogen is also considered today as a promising energy carrier but the burning of hydrogen creates radically new challenges which need to be understood and anticipated. HESTIA specifically focuses on increasing the scientific knowledge of the hydrogen-air combustion of future hydrogen fuelled aero-engines. The related physical phenomena will be evaluated through the execution of fundamental experiments. This experimental work will be closely coupled to numerical activities which will adapt or develop models and progressively increase their maturity so that they can be integrated into industrial CFD codes. Different challenges are to be addressed in HESTIA project in a wide range of topics: - Improvement of the scientific understanding of hydrogen-air turbulent combustion: preferential diffusion of hydrogen, modification of turbulent burning velocity, thermoacoustics, NOx emissions, adaptation of optical diagnostics; - Assessment of innovative injection systems for H2 optimized combustion chamber: flashback risk, lean-blow out, stability, NOx emission minimisation, ignition; - Improvement of CFD tools and methodologies for numerical modelling of H2 combustion in both academic and industrial configurations. To this end, HESTIA gathers 17 universities and research centres as well as the 6 European aero-engine manufacturers to significantly prepare in a coherent and robust manner for the future development of environmentally friendly combustion chambers.

The aim of this proposal is to transform the design and manufacture of structural systems by relieving the bottleneck caused by the current practice of restricting designs to a linear dynamic regime. Our ambition is to not only address the challenge of dealing with nonlinearity, but to unlock the huge potential which can be gained from exploiting its positive attributes. The outputs will be a suite of novel modelling and control techniques which can be used directly in the design processes for structural systems, which we will demonstrate on a series of industry based experimental demonstrators. These design tools will enable a transformation in the performance of engineering structural systems which are under rapidly increasing demands from technological, economic and environmental pressures. The performance of engineering structures and systems is governed by how well they behave in their operating environment. For a significant number of engineering sectors, such as wind power generation, automotive, medical robotics, aerospace and large civil infrastructure, dynamic effects dominate the operational regime. As a result, understanding structural dynamics is crucial for ensuring that we have safe, reliable and efficient structures. In fact, the related mathematical problems extend to other modelling problems encountered in other important research areas such as systems biology, physiological modelling and information technology. So what exactly is the problem we are seeking to address in this proposal? Typically, when the behaviour of an engineering system is linear, computer simulations can be used to make very accurate predictions of its dynamic behaviour. The concept of end-to-end simulation and virtual prototyping, verification and testing has become a key paradigm across many sectors. The problem with this simulation based approach is that it is built on implicit assumptions of repeatability and linearity. For example, many structural analysis methods are based on the concept of a frequency domain charaterisation, which assumes that response of the system can be characterised by linear superposition of the response to each frequency seperately. But, the response of nonlinear systems is known to display amplitude dependence, sensitivity to transient effects in the forcing, and potential bistability or multiplicity of outcome for the same input frequency. As a result, when the system is nonlinear (which is nearly always the case for a large number of important industrial problems) it is almost impossible to make dynamic predictions without introducing very limiting approximations and simplifications. For example, throughout recent history, there have been many examples of unwanted vibrations; Failure of the Tacoma Narrows bridge (1940); cable-deck coupled vibrations on the DongTing Lake Bridge (1999); human induced vibration on the Millennium Bridge (2000); NASA Helios failure (2003); Coupling between thrusters and natural frequencies of the flexible structure on the International Space Station (2009); Landing gear shimmy. In many cases, the complexity of modern designs has outstripped our ability to understand their dynamic behaviour in detail. Even with the benefit of high power computing, which has enabled engineers to carry out detailed simulations, interpreting results from these simulations is a fundamental bottleneck, and it would seem that our ability to match experimental results is not improving, due primarily to the combination of random and uncertain effects and the failure of the linear superposition approach. As a result a new type of structural dynamics, which fully embraces nonlinearity, is urgently needed to enable the most efficient design and manufacture of the next generation of engineering structures.