22 March 2016
In this week's Senior Section Assembly, Dave Rugg, a senior materials engineer at Rolls Royce came to give a talk about the work of his company who manufacture jet engines for airplanes and nuclear power plants for submarines. Concentrating on the jet engines, he explained how they work, and about the incredible amount of research and development (R&D) that goes into making them. The engines have to work at incredibly high pressures and temperatures without failing, so the metals and other materials have to be engineered to absolute precision – at an atomic level. He mentioned some of the new facilities around the world, like the Diamond Light Source at Harwell, and the interestingly named 'Wiggler' at Stanford in the USA that Rolls Royce use to do this. The boys were fascinated and asked lots of questions – including finding out that Dave's favourite scientist is Richard Feynman.
