Veritasium unpacks why jet engines, which burn fuel at temperatures above 1,600 °C, don’t just melt into blobs of metal. You’ll get a crash course on turbine anatomy—how compressors, combustors and turbines fit together—and a peek inside Rolls-Royce’s casting facility to see the evolution from the first jet engine to today’s behemoths.
The real magic lies in materials science: nickel-based superalloys (with just the right gamma-prime phase), single-crystal blades grown to resist edge dislocations, microscopic cooling channels and thermal-barrier coatings. By tuning crystal orientation and microstructure, engineers keep turbine blades intact even when they’re essentially baking in a rocket-hot blast.
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