R&T @ RRD - Rolls-Royce Deutschland

This week I started work with Rolls-Royce Deutschland. It is located in a little town called Dahlewitz waaaaaay far south from Berlin (actually located in Brandenburg). I have about a 1 hour train/bus ride each way to and from work. I guess I get to be a commuter for a while... My work is going to involve the same sort of things that I did last summer in Indianapolis working for Rolls-Royce North America. I'm going to be performing CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) on combustors for gas turbine engines. By the way, Rolls-Royce does NOT make cars anymore. They moved out of that business a long time ago and gave the name to BMW. Rolls-Royce is technically in the market of making gas-turbine engines, mostly turbojets and turboprops for aircraft. So when I say I work on a combustor, it's the part of the engine where the fuel mixes with the gas and burns, creating LOTS of energy. Anyways, my job is to try to help the team that improves the program which models the combustor. I'm doing this by setting up a grid with all of the geometry of the combustor and then describing what is happening at all of the boundaries. Then, I run the code and obtain lots of data. If my data matches what scientists think actually happens in the combustor, then I have good results. This type of work is very interesting as it allows me to purely learn about what goes on in combustors without having to have any prior knowledge. I run my code and "discover" all of the inter-workings of these very advanced combustors. It's pretty cool stuff and I think it's definitely going to help me prepare for some type of aero work in the future.

The office space is very nice with huge windows overlooking the rest of the factory. It's very open and you can see all of the other people working in your team at the same time (unlike my narrow little cubicle I had in Indy...) There's also free coffee that you can drink all day long! This will really help my work skills... My boss seems really nice and I was able to talk with him for a long time about my project and other random computer stuff. He's originally from the Netherlands and his native language is Dutch, but his English and his German are both really good. He seems like he's a very smart guy and I think that I'll be able to learn a lot from him. I guess I'm going to see how much I can pick up during my three months here...