ACADEMIA

The two major awards at this year's Rolls-Royce Chairman's Awards for Technical Innovation have been won by engineers who solved vital challenges in current and future engine products to meet the needs of civil and military customers. Dr Carsten Streller, a former university lecturer who joined Rolls-Royce five years ago at its German facility in Dahlewitz, is estimated to be saving the company US$2 million a year with his innovative method of minimising high-pressure system vibration in the BR700 engine family. Since implementing Dr Streller's method, which employs a validated whole engine model, the results achieved from this model are now used on every engine that passes through the assembly line to determine the optimum orientation of rotor blades, and BR700 pass-off rejections have been virtually eliminated. A multi-site technical team was assembled to design the novel shaft-driven LiftFan(tm) for the propulsion system for Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fan. The challenge for this task was to ensure the fan could operate effectively in a highly-distorted flow region behind a short inlet with cross-winds up to 250 knots. By using computational fluid dynamics techniques and innovative manufacturing solutions, lower weight as well as stronger and more tolerant components resulted from the work of the design team that comprised Nigel Chivers, Dr Steven Halliday, Mark Jones, Steve Lee, James McLaren and Jon Moore. At last night's awards, staged at the company's Learning and Development Centre in Derby, Rolls-Royce Chairman Euan Baird - addressing the audience at his first awards ceremony - spoke of the vital nature of innovation to high-technology companies such as Rolls-Royce that relied for their competitive edge on the quality and impact of their engineering. Mr Baird said: "These awards are very important for our future - as they are all about rewarding people for the contribution they make in ensuring our products provide a first-class service to customers. We have a good spread of employees receiving awards, which is entirely appropriate for a global company that has high-class engineering talent everywhere that it has facilities. "As well as our individual and team prizes, we have elected five new members of the Rolls-Royce Fellowship Scheme that acknowledges that a number of our engineers are global experts in their respective fields. "We have also made further awards to teams that have worked on ideas leading to high-value patents, and selected winners for some of our annual commemorative trophies, donated by or on behalf of noted Rolls-Royce engineers of the past."