General Electric: Despite several plane crashes this year, the air travel it is one of the safest and fastest ways to travel 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 commercial aircraft engines. The propellers inside the Boeing 737-B 1 LEAP engine are made of carbon fiber composite material, and the low-pressure blades are made of aluminum titanium, 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 specific ice forms and to ensure that the plane can fly without problems. In addition to starting the engines in frost conditions, testers are starting to shoot huge ice balls in a running engine.
In 2009 the US Airways landed in the Hudson River reminding the public and regulators that birds can do a lot of damage to jet engines. Large birds in particular can bend the engine blades, making the engine sluggish, or at worst ready to explode. Bird crash testing is exactly what you think: they throw (already dead) chickens into the engines. The objective of the test is to ensure that the blades are not deformed by 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.
