Rolls-Royce has welcomed Business Secretary, Greg Clark to Derby to celebrate the start of work on its new testbed facility. The plans for the testbed were announced in June 2017 as part of a wider £150m investment in UK aerospace facilities.
The new testbed, which is expected to be commissioned in 2020, will support Rolls-Royce’s ongoing industrial transformation and will provide important additional capacity as the civil aerospace business continues to ramp-up engine production and deliver on a record order book.
Capable of testing a range of today’s engines, including the Trent XWB and the Trent 1000, the facility will also serve as a base for testing UltraFan, Rolls-Royce’s engine for the next generation of aircraft.
The new testbed, which will be the largest indoor facility of its type in the world, will harness the latest digital technology to set conditions and obtain evidence from a wide variety of test activities, such as water ingestion and endurance testing. It will also benefit from the latest advancements in test equipment including new x-ray capabilities.
The testbed itself will have an internal area of 7,500m2, making it larger than a Premiership football pitch, and will be surrounded by two concrete walls which measure up to 1.7m thick.