Rolls Royce to make Self-Repairing Jet Engines

At the 2018 Singapore Airshow, Rolls-Royce introduced IntelligentEngine, it is a new initiative aimed at developing intelligent aircraft engines that will be safer and more efficient thanks to their ability to communicate with each other and their support networks. They would also learn from their own previous experience and the experience of other engines, and with technological advances, may one day even be able to repair themselves.

These days, aerospace engines are incredibly complex pieces of machinery that require great deal of care and maintenance, and with the high growing demand each year, keeping up with this is a major problem.

IntelligentEngine is an extension of the company’s TotalCare service, which began back in the 1990s after the company recognized that selling aircraft engines was also linked to the services to maintain and upgrade them.

IntelligentEngine will work towards the future where engine design, testing, and maintaining them using a digital technology to further blend engines and support services. Using a Big Data and machine learning, the IntelligentEngine vision will make the engine adapt to its environment and operating context. This will not only let it learn, but also to anticipate its requirements and make changes. For example, in response to improve efficiency and reliability will reduce costs and risks.

This way the machine will have a continuous two-way communication between the engine and other parts of the service ecosystem, the engines will be able to deal with problems before they become apparent and also learn how to improve performance.

In the future where artificial intelligent is smart enough, advance robotics may allow engines of tomorrow to not only know when it needs maintenance, but also to carry it out automatically.

Previously, we would know what is happening inside the engine, but with the advent of all this data, we know much more about where the engine is going and how it is being used, which will provide insights into how we can optimise the efficiency, durability and availability of the engine. Engines will also automatically be aware of themselves through Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, and they would be able to diagnosed an issue and able to fix itself if needed.