What Happens If You Throw Sand Into a Jet Engine?

Veritasium takes you on a whirlwind tour of jet engines—from basic compression and combustion to the ginormous turbines that keep planes aloft. You’ll see inside Rolls-Royce’s precision casting facility, uncover why nickel-based superalloys (with gamma-prime phases and single-crystal grains) resist melting, and learn how edge dislocations and crystal structures make blades incredibly heat-tolerant.

To wrap it up, Derek Muller runs the ultimate experiment: he hurls sand into a spinning turbine and shows exactly why those perfectly cast blades need both high-tech metallurgy and precise cooling to survive foreign-object damage.

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