General Electric: Despite several air accidents this year, air travel is one of the safest and fastest ways to travel over long distances.
Of course, a big part of flight safety is paying extra attention to control quality, as well as extensive testing, which costs billions.
After the necessary tests, the engines are certified and are ready to ship aircraft (such as Boeing 777 600.000-pounds) to their destination at 500 mph. Engines are designed to pull air, but they must be able to compete with anything else they can encounter in the sky, such as birds and bad weather. To ensure each case, manufacturers perform the necessary tests. How; They start to operate the engines and fly things in.
Η General Electric, one of the few companies that manufactures engines for commercial aircraft. The propellers inside a Boeing 737-B 1 LEAP engine are made of synthetic material with carbon fiber, and the low-pressure fins are made of titanium aluminide, a NASA alloy.
But let's see the tests as presented by Wired.
At first things are easy. The engines will have to pass the water test. So GE starts to launch water at high pressure (800 liters of water per minute) into a GEnx engine. If the test goes well as planned, all the water runs from the rear without reducing the thrust of the engine. This means it can handle the drift easily during a flight.
Ice is slightly more problematic, so much so that the FAA requires engines to be able to handle certain forms of ice and ensure the plane can fly without problem. In addition to starting the engines in freezing conditions, the testers begin shooting huge balls of ice into a running engine.
2009, US Airways, landed on the Hudson River reminding the public and regulators that birds can do a lot of damage to jet engines. Especially big birds can bend the blades of the engine, making the engine slow, or worst ready to explode. Bird crash test is exactly what you think: they chase chickens (already dead) on the engines. The goal of the test is not to alter the shape of the blades by the impact.
But the most violent test is the "blade-off" process. The test simulates the detachment of a blade at the front of the machine due to wear while the motor rotates with over 3000 RPM. With this engine speed, the blade can become fragments that can be jetted everywhere. You can see this video.
To assure technicians that the blade will break into fragments, they place a small explosive at its base. If the test goes well, the blade remains in the engine chamber absorbing the impact energy.
