The high-pressure turbine disc is the centrepiece that sits on the N1 rotor and rotates at 46,000 rpm.  In order to hold the rotor blades, fir tree roots have to be cut into it for blade-to-disc connection, and the last of these are being done right now.

As seen in the last AMA, the first batch of waxes are ready to go to casting for the first set of test high pressure turbine blades for GT50.

An important innovation has been to start developing a new process for 3D printing casting waxes in-house, which reduces the cost of producing them by about a factor of 30, representing an incredible saving. These are of course the burnout waxes used to create the shells we cast from.

These new in-house produced investments will be tested in parallel with the first batch.

The blades will be cast in super alloy commissioned from our suppliers.  Although the alloy came in with a mill certificate saying that it met all the performance requirements, our own exacting tests picked up that the alloy isn’t quite hitting the performance levels that we need. We are investigating the situation so that we can solve it before we cast the blades – clearly, they have to perform as expected when we put them in the engine.