New £90m testbed

Rolls-Royce has said that a new £90 million aero engine testbed being built in Derby remains on course to start operating this year.

Known as Testbed 80, it will be used to test current engines – as well as larger engines currently in development.

Rolls-Royce, which designs, develops and builds the Trent family of engines at Derby, is investing in the new facility because existing testbeds at the Sinfin site are not large enough to accommodate future engines, such as the Ultrafan.

Once complete, Testbed 80 will be the largest of its kind in the world, with an internal area of 7,500 square metres and walls (making it larger than a football pitch). It will be surrounded by two concrete walls measuring up to 1.7 metres thick.

The new testbed will also give the Derby site more testing capacity for engines currently in production, such as the Trent XWB, which is the world's fastest-selling civil large engine, as well as the more powerful Trent XWB-97, the Trent 1000 TEN and the Trent 7000.

Rolls-Royce posted an update on the build, saying that the new testbed should be ready to start putting engines through their paces later this year.

It said: “The 7,500 square metre Testbed 80 in Derby, UK – the largest testbed of its type in the world – will start running its first Trent engines later this year.

“By 2021, the testbed will be playing a vital role in the world beyond Trent that Rolls-Royce is already planning for.

“The UltraFan engine demonstrator will start ground tests on the bed, as part of a development programme that will result in service availability towards the end of this decade and offer a 25% improvement in fuel consumption compared to the very first Trent engine.”

The new testbed, part of a wider £150 million investment in the firm’s civil aerospace business, is an important development for Rolls-Royce’s Sinfin site as it effectively commits the company to the city for next 30 years, safeguarding around 7,000 jobs.