Profile

I work as a Safety and Reliability Engineer for Rolls-Royce Plc. in Derby, No, I don’t have a company car and we don’t even build cars any more! (Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is owned and run by BMW).

I work in the Civil Aerospace division where we design and build jet engines, just like the ones you might find under the wing whilst flying off on holiday with your family.

A Spitfire and a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Both powered by Rolls-Royce. 

My job is to make sure that the engines we design are safe and reliable enough to meet some really tough targets set by governments. This means I use Maths and Statistics to prove that your average Jumbo Jet (Boeing 747-400) could fly to the moon and back over 10,000 times without a major engine breakdown. Of course that’s silly because jet engines and aeroplanes don’t work in the vacuum of space, but you get the idea.

A Trent-XWB Engine on flight test with the Airbus A380

If you’d like to know more about the company and the other markets we work in please watch the video below which shows how we’re creating “Better Power for a Changing World!”.

Alternatively you can;

Visit our website  – http://www.rolls-royce.com/

Like us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RollsRoyceGroup

My day starts when I get to the office at around 7:30am. Don’t worry not all Engineers have to get up so early, I like to be in the office at this time it’s nice and quiet. (It also means I get to go home early 😀 ).

Engineers hard at work in the office.

In the morning I might have some meetings with Design Engineers who will want to talk to me about their latest design ideas. We’ll discuss it and then they’ll provide me with all the data I need to go and do some calculations.

Design Engineers reviewing engine parts after a test.

I take the data which the other engineers give to me and I look at it to understand what the data is telling me. This is usually done by looking at graphs and tables which are really helpful to show trends and relationships.

A graph showing data about a part.

Maths and Statistics are very important to my job because they give us hard facts to base our theories on, without them we only have opinions which can often be wrong.

After lunch I’ll use the data to programme a model into the computer and then run a simulation to show how the component will operate in a real engine.

A computer model of our latest engine concept.

From that simulation I can tell when and how the component will break and what the effect of that will be on the engine. So then I can tell the Design Engineers if their latest design is safe and reliable enough to meet our targets. This usually involves me giving a presentation or writing a report, so good English and Presentation skills are a must for any Engineer.

The test bed control room.

Once I’ve finished my report or presentation I might ask the Design Engineers to do some testing to prove the theories from my simulation. The results of which can be explosive! The video below shows a “Fan Blade Off” Test where we deliberately break one of the Fan Blades at the front of the engine at Maximum power. This is to prove the engine will safely shut down, which this one did.

I always remember from my school days that the equipment we had to do experiments with was often old, broken or a bit boring. I’d like to donate the money to local schools to help them purchase new science equipment they can use to develop really exciting practicals which will help inspire young people like yourselves to get hands on and involved with science and engineering.