General Electric: Despite several plane crashes this year, air travel is one of the safest and fastest ways to travel long distances.
Naturally, a large part of flight safety is the great attention to quality control, as well as the extensive testing, which costs billions.
After the necessary tests the engines are certified and are ready to send aircraft, (like the Boeing 777 600,000‑pounds) to their destination at speeds of 500 mph. The engines have been designed to pull air, but they must be able to cope with whatever else they may encounter in the sky, such as birds and bad weather conditions. To ensure each case, manufacturers carry out the necessary tests. How? They begin to operate the engines and fly various things inside.
General Electric, one of the few companies that makes engines for commercial aircraft. The propellers inside a Boeing 737 LEAP 1-B engine are made of carbon fiber composite, and the low-pressure blades are made of titanium aluminide, a NASA alloy.
Let's see, however, the tests as presented by Wired.
At first, things are easy. The engines must pass the water test. Thus, GE begins to spray water at high pressure (800 liters of water per minute) into a GEnx engine. If the test goes well as designed, all the water exits from the back without reducing the engine's thrust. This means it can easily handle light rain during a flight.
Ice is slightly more problematic, so much so that the FAA requires engines to be able to handle specific forms of ice and to ensure that the aircraft can fly without issue. In addition to starting the engines in freezing conditions, testers begin to fire huge ice balls into an engine that is running.
In 2009 US Airways landed on the Hudson River, reminding the public and regulators that birds can cause serious damage to jet engines. Especially large birds can bend the engine blades, slowing the engine, or in the worst case ready to explode. The bird-strike test is exactly what you think: they fire chickens (already dead) into the engines. The goal of the test is to ensure that the blade shape is not altered by the impact.
The most brutal test, however, is the “blade-off” procedure. The test simulates the detachment of a blade on the front of the machine due to wear, while the engine is spinning at over 3000 RPM. At this engine speed, the blade can break into fragments that can be thrown everywhere. You can watch this video.
To ensure the technicians that the blade will shatter into fragments, they also place a small explosive at its base. If the test goes well, the blade remains inside the engine chamber that absorbs the impact energy.
