The Rolls-Royce and Airbus A350 jet engine up close for the first time

Fuel efficiency is good for the environment, but it also saves airlines money. That doesn’t mean the price of travel is falling. But it does mean a lot energy goes into advancing jet engine technology.

The British car and engine maker, Rolls-Royce, is proud of its new Trent XWB jet engine. They say it’s the most fuel efficient engine in the world. It was designed specifically for the Airbus A350 passenger plane and uses light materials to reduce weight and increase fuel efficiency.

Engineers describe it with four words, saying it “sucks, squeezes, bangs, and blows.”

The Trent XWB sucks in about 1.3 tonnes of air per second. The air is compressed, or “squeezed,” and then in the combustion chamber, it is heated to about half the surface temperature of the sun. Finally, “bang” – and the engine blows the air back out, creating a thrust of 97,000lbs.

It was on show for the first time at the 2016 Hanover Fair.

ANALYSIS: Rolls-Royce harvests a decade of research for new engine projects

As Rolls-Royce prepares to build and begin testing next year its seventh member of the Trent family – the 7000 for the Airbus A330neo – it is harvesting the fruits of a decade’s worth of research and development projects into two studies that could form the basis for a new generation of widebody – and even possibly narrowbody – engines in the 2020s.

The UK propulsion specialist wants to develop technology and products that will secure a 50% share of the twin-aisle market, as well as – perhaps more ambitiously – help it break back into the growing single-aisle sector, vacated when it abandoned the International Aero Engines consortium in 2012, just when a host of new narrowbody programmes were arriving on the market.

ANALYSIS: Rolls-Royce makes progress with Trent 7000

Although understandably coy before Airbus’s Farnborough announcement that it was launching the A330neo, Rolls-Royce was by July quite far along the path of finalising the design for the Trent 7000, the 72,000lb (320kN) thrust engine that will exclusively power the re-engined widebody. Rolls-Royce already has a more than 50% share of engines on in-service A330s, with its original Trent 700.