[5] At the September 1988 Farnborough Airshow, the 65,000–72,000 lbf (290–320 kN) -524L development was confirmed, estimated at £300 million, to power the MD-11 and A330 as a full-scale model was unveiled by Frank Whittle.

New proposed planes required higher thrust and customers wanted the Boeing 777 and Airbus A330 twinjets to fly Extended-range Twin-engine Operations at introduction.

Rolls-Royce decided to offer an engine for every large civil airliner, based on a common core to lower development costs, and the three-shaft design provided flexibility, allowing each spool to be individually scaled.

The Trent family keeps a similar layout, but each spool can be individually scaled and can rotate more closely to its optimal speed.

Hollow titanium fan blades with an internal Warren-girder structure achieve strength, stiffness and damage tolerance at low weight.

[11] To operate in temperatures above their melting point, cooling air is bled from the compressor through laser-drilled holes in the hollow turbine blades, made from a single-crystal of a nickel alloy and covered by thermal barrier coatings.

[11] In April 1998, the RB211-524HT was introduced for the 747-400 with the Trent 700 core, replacing the previous RB211-524G/H with 2% better TSFC, up to a 40% lower NOx emissions and a 50 °C cooler turbine.

[14] At the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 programme launch at the end of 1986, the airframe was only offered with GE CF6-80C2 or PW4000 engines, however Rolls-Royce was preparing to propose the 747-400's RB211-524D4D rated at 58,000 lbf (260 kN).

The Trent 700 was first selected by Cathay Pacific in April 1989, first ran in summer 1992, was certified in January 1994[18] and put into service in March 1995.

[45] In July, Rolls-Royce was to supply its Trent 600 for the 767-400ERX and Boeing 747X, while the European Union was limiting the Engine Alliance offer on quadjets.

Corrosion-related fatigue cracking of IP turbine blades was discovered in early 2016, grounding up to 44 aircraft and costing Rolls-Royce at least £1354 million.

Besides Rolls-Royce, the Trent 60 is also packaged by UK-based Centrax LTD,[69] a privately owned engineering firm based in Newton Abbot, UK.

[70] Sales of the Trent family of engines have made Rolls-Royce the second biggest supplier of large civil turbofans after General Electric,[71] relegating rival Pratt & Whitney to third position.

[a] On 17 January 2008, a British Airways Boeing 777-236ER, operating as Flight 38 from Beijing to London, crash-landed at Heathrow Airport after both Trent 800 engines lost power during the aircraft's final approach.

[77] On 4 November 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380-842 (Registration VH-OQA), operating as Flight 32 en route from Singapore to Sydney, suffered an uncontained engine failure (explosion) in one of its four Trent 972-84.

[82] In late 2018 Rolls-Royce has ground tested its ALPS demonstrator: a Trent 1000 fitted with composite fan blades and case, including bird strike trials.

[86] The Advance3 ground-based demonstrator includes lean burn, run before on a Trent architecture only; ceramic matrix composite (CMC) for turbine high-temperature capability in the first stage seal segments and cast-bond first stage vanes; hybrid ball bearings with ceramic rollers running on metallic races, required to manage high load environments inside smaller cores.

[87] Opened in 2016, R-R's $30 million CMC facility in California produced its first parts, seals, for the start of their deployment before being used in the static components of the second-stage HP turbine.

[88] The Advance3 will survey bearing load, water ingestion, noise sources and their mitigation, heat and combustor rumble while blade-tip, internal clearances and adaptive control operation are radiographed in-motion to verify the thermo-mechanical modelling.

[88] Advanced cooled metallic components and ceramic matrix composite parts will be tested in a late 2018 demonstrator based on a Trent XWB-97 within the high temperature turbine technology (HT3) initiative.

[91] The lean burn combustor did not generate any rumble as further tests will cover water ingestion, noise, X-rays of the engine operating, and core-zone and hot-end thermal surveys.

[88] Indoor ground tests of the lean-burn combustor were concluded on a modified Trent 1000 in January 2018, before being sent to Manitoba for cold-weather trials in February 2018, covering start-ups and ice ingestion.

[94] Rolls-Royce worked with Industria de Turbo Propulsores to test ion plating (IP) turbine blade technologies.

[95] In Dahlewitz near Berlin, Rolls-Royce built a power rig simulating loading conditions in flight, sized for 15–80 MW (20,000–107,000 hp) gear systems; and recruited 200 engineers.

[88] At the September 2017 International Society for Air Breathing Engines (ISABE) conference in Manchester, UK, Rolls-Royce's Chief Technology Officer Paul Stein announced it reached 52 MW (70,000 hp).

[82] In April 2018, Airbus agreed to provide aircraft integration and its nacelle and for flight testing, co-funded by the European Union research programme Clean Sky 2.

[92] The 800 mm (2 ft 7 in) diameter planetary gearbox has five planet gears, is sized to power 110–490 kN (25,000–110,000 lbf) turbofans and amassed over 250 hours of run time by early 2019.

[106] By March 2022, Rolls-Royce had transferred the power gearbox, tested to 64 MW (86,000 hp), from Dahlewitz to its UK site for assembly,[107] By May 2023, the first run was made with an 80,000 lbf (360 kN) demonstrator having a 14:1 bypass ratio, carbon-titanium fan blades, an Advance3 core and a new combustor.

[108] In November 2023, it was announced that the demonstrator had achieved at least 85,000 lbf (380 kN) in maximum power tests, exceeding the design brief of 80,000lbf and had accumulated over 70 hours of run-time.

[109] At the 2024 Farnborough Air Show, Rolls-Royce announced upgrades to its Trent engines, with some enhancements drawing on the UltraFan technology demonstrator project.