Rolls-Royce's Pearl 15 celebrates important test milestone
Rolls-Royce has reached an important milestone within the Pearl 15 test programme, successfully achieving 10,000 test cycles in over 2,600 testing hours. Within the comprehensive, global test programme, six individual Pearl 15 development engines with 14 builds have been used in 27 test campaigns.
The campaigns include tests under extreme icing conditions, massive water ingestions, lightning strikes and long-lasting maturity runs - all putting the engine under enormous stress. For the cold starts the entire engine gets cooled down to below -40°C, a temperature where the viscosity of the fuel is comparable to honey. Even under those challenging conditions the engine has to start and run up to take-off thrust without any disruptions. Water ingestion and lightning strike testing makes sure the engine won’t fail even when flying directly through the worst thunderstorms. To prove it doesn’t, more than 6,000 gallons of water per hour are sprayed at the fan for a period of three minutes – that’s 23,000 litres of water per hour - much more than an engine would experience in service.
The company’s site in Dahlewitz, Germany, has already started to build the first production standard engines and is preparing for the production ramp-up while maturity testing is on track to support a smooth entry into service at the end of 2019.
The engine received EASA certification on 28 February 2018 and was unveiled to the market at the EBACE Conference in Geneva in May 2018 in parallel with the new Bombardier Global 5500 and Global 6500 jets. Both aircraft are exclusively powered by the purpose-built Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 engine.
Dr. Dirk Geisinger, Director Business Aviation, Rolls-Royce, said: “This is an important milestone that underpins an on-track delivery. We’re proud of the pioneering technology and outstanding performance we have designed into this engine and our comprehensive testing guarantees sophisticated maturity and reliability levels from the outset. It will support Bombardier’s successful Global family of aircraft in setting new standards in the ultra-long-range corporate jet market.”
The Pearl engine combines innovative technologies derived from Rolls-Royce’s Advance2 technology demonstrator programmes with proven features from the BR700, today’s leading engine family in business aviation. The Pearl 15 also exemplifies Rolls-Royce’s pioneering IntelligentEngine vision of a future where product and service become indistinguishable thanks to advancements in digital capability. As well as a new-generation Engine Health Monitoring System that introduces advanced vibration detection, the engine benefits from the incorporation of advanced remote engine diagnostics and bi-directional communications that allow for easy remote reconfiguration of engine-monitoring features from the ground.
Compared with the highly successful BR710, the Pearl 15 features the same nacelle envelope but is more powerful, with a maximum certified thrust of 15,250lb; has up to seven per cent better specific fuel consumption; is two dB cumulative quieter; and shows a 20% improvement in NOx emissions margin.
Designed for high levels of reliability, the Pearl family will be supported by the Rolls-Royce CorporateCare service.