Why don’t jet engines melt? Veritasium takes you on a whirlwind tour from the first Frank Whittle designs to the heart of a modern Rolls-Royce engine, explaining how turbines actually work, why they’re so massive and what keeps those spinning blades from turning into molten goo at 1,600 °C.
The secret sauce is cutting-edge materials science: nickel-based superalloys full of gamma-prime precipitates, single-crystal casting to eliminate weak grain boundaries, and ceramic thermal-barrier coatings. Layer on a web of tiny internal air-cooling channels and you’ve got blades that survive heat far beyond their melting point—no engineering magic wand required.
Watch on YouTube
Top comments (0)