GE Reports

By Tomas Kellner

GE has signed a new export deal with the UK government that could create as many as a thousand jobs in the country.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of a similar agreement last week with the French export credit agency COFACE that could create 400 jobs there, making this GE’s second ECA agreement with a foreign government lender since Congress failed to reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank in June.

Over the past weeks, headlines in the United States, Europe and Asia have touted a series of new agreements on global trade as GE and other companies have been seeking to blunt the impact of the U.S. Ex-Im Bank’s lapse in operations. The U.S. Congress did not renew the Ex-Im Bank, as it is commonly known, at the end of June. Since then, the Bank has been unable to provide new loans, making the United States the only major industrial country to operate without an export credit agency.

While U.S. companies continue to urge Congress to renew the Bank, many have been forced to pursue alternative financing for their global customers or risk losing business. In addition to GE’s announcements last week, Boeing and Orbital Sciences Corporation, a Virginia-based satellite company, have reported lost satellite deals resulting from a lack of Ex-Im financing.

Top: GE’s H80 turboprop engine inside a testing cell in Prague. Above: The blades of an aeroderivative turbine. Images credit: GE Reports

Today’s agreement with the UK export credit agency UK Export Finance (UKEF), will unlock $12 billion in financing for UK-manufactured exports. The agreement will support both confirmed and potential orders in a number of international markets including Brazil, Ghana, India and Mozambique – markets that either require ECA financing or where such financing is critical to secure a competitive advantage. GE estimates that winning these orders will help it create up to 1000 new jobs in the UK in the energy sector.

“We are doing everything we can to make Britain the best place in Europe to start, finance or grow a business,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron. “GE’s substantial commitment through this agreement is fantastic news. It will provide jobs and security for people working in the energy sector and elsewhere. It is a vote of confidence in our long term economic plan.”

GE is already one of the leading investors into the UK, investing over $21 billion dollars in the UK since 2003. As part of the deal, UKEF has added GE as a member of its Direct Lending Facility Partnership Panel, which will allow the company to provide technical, commercial and financial solutions to its customers.

GE Aviation already makes in the UK wing components for Airbus A380 (above) and A350 aircraft. Image credit: Adam Senatori/GE Reports 

Prior to today’s UKEF agreement, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt visited Paris to formalize GE’s agreement with COFACE, which could ultimately create 400 jobs at GE’s facility in Belfort.

GE also announced last week that it would move 100 jobs responsible for final assembly of aeroderivative turbines from the U.S. to Hungary and China to ensure customer access to Export Credit Agency (ECA) financing in those countries. Additionally, last week, GE Aviation announced that it would create a $400 million turboprop engine development, test and production operation in Europe that could ultimately support between 500 to 1000 jobs.

GE has been in close talks over recent months with various ECAs in order to secure funding for its customers. The company made it clear that it would expand its operations in markets where ECA financing is available based on a lack of ECA financing at home.

By Tomas Kellner

The denizens of the world’s sprawling megacities all face similar daily challenges: traffic, busy sidewalks, packed puclic transportation, no available parking. “Urbanization is coming at us like a freight train,” says Rick Freeman, global product manager for intelligent devices at GE Lighting. “The same old ways are plain going to fail. We have to get ready.”

There’s no time to spare. McKinsey & Co. reported in June that more than half of the world’s population already lives in cities and that the figure will grow to 60 percent by 2014, swelling urban areas by 1.4 billion people.

Our cities have to become intelligent if they’re going to thrive in the midst of this shift. “Intelligent lighting” systems, for example, could help the cities in the future reduce congestion, free up parking spots, find ideal locations for new bike lanes, give the police and paramedics real-time views of parks and neighborhoods and send environmental alerts, Freeman says. Two intelligent lighting pilots, in San Diego and Jacksonville, are already gathering data. “Having all that knowledge gives us insights we never had before,” Freeman says.

The project in downtown San Diego involves a system GE calls “Intelligent Environments for Cities.” It’s an example of GE connecting machines – in this case LED street lamps – to the Industrial Internet, a network that links devices with software analytics and the data cloud.

Lighting started working with San Diego in 2014, when it installed a wireless system called LightGrid to remotely assess and control 3,000 streetlights. The city is saving more than $250,000 annually in electricity and maintenance costs as a result.

San Diego is testing GE's Intelligent Environments for Cities system in the Little Italy and Gaslight neighborhoods. Image credit: GE Lighting

The new downtown pilot is the first intelligent lighting application in the U.S. It involves fixtures located in the Little Italy and Gaslamp districts. The lights are equipped with sensors and computer-vision software that can pull parking and other data for real-time analysis into Predix – GE’s cloud-based platform for the Industrial Internet. “San Diego is switching on the potential of our streetlights in ways that seemed improbable just a few years ago because of GE’s Intelligent Cities technology,” said David Graham, deputy chief operating office of San Diego.

3,000 "intelligent" street lights from GE are already helping San Diego save $250,000 per year. Image credit: GE Lighting

Officials are now studying data trends from the new pilot to determine the best benefits for the city and its residents.

The potential applications for the system are endless. The data could help software developers build effective parking apps that would lead users to an empty spot and allow them to pay for it from their smartphones.

Freeman envisions a future where you could make a dinner reservation, find the fastest way to get to the restaurant and book a parking spot with the same app. “The cost of computing continues to fall along with the amounts of electricity needed to power the sensors,” Freeman says. “At the same time, wireless mesh and WiFi networks are emerging across cities. The convergence of these things makes this space a really exciting place to be.”

Just last week, for example, the White House announced that it would invest $160 million in a new “Smart Cities” initiative. The money will use new technology partnerships to help communities with their most pressing challenges, according to a White House press release.

By Tomas Kellner

One way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change is to cease burning fossil fuels. Sounds easy, but such a sudden stop would likely plunge most of today’s world into darkness and send some of the biggest and fastest growing economies off a cliff. The reality is that coal-fired power plants, the biggest emitters of CO2, are not going away anytime soon, not in the U.S. and especially not in countries like China and India which already burn half of the world’s coal and are leading builders of new plants.

That’s why scientists around the world are looking at the next best thing and developing new kinds of traps to stop carbon from escaping through the smokestack. GE’s Phil DiPietro and Bob Perry have been experimenting with a family of promising materials called amino silicones, commonly found in bathrooms and laundry rooms in hair conditioners and textile softeners. “Although they are in the same family, I wouldn’t recommend washing your hair or your laundry with the amino silicones we’ve developed,” laughs Perry, a chemist at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY, who spent the last decade developing the technology. “They’re specially formulated to scrub carbon.”

So far, the materials have been up to scratch. The U.S. DOE is holding a competition for developers of CO2 capture technologies. The prize: a chance to test your concept at a scale equivalent to a 10-megawatt coal-fired power plant. GE has passed the first phase and is now in the mix with five other developers to compete in the second leg.

Top: Positive results allowed Perry and his team, including from the left technologists Sarah Genovese, Rachel Farnum, Tiffany Westendorf, to scale his research from a test bench (in the background) to power plants simulators. Above: GE is testing its industrial amino silicone CO2 scrubber in Alabama. Images credit: GE Global Research

The DOE will pick two finalists from that round, who will get a chance to prove their technology at the world’s largest industrial-scale CO2 capture test facility in Mongstad, Norway. The $1 billion site will allow the teams to simulate the output of a 10-megawatt coal-fired power plant and use amino silicone to capture CO2 coming through the smokestack. “This is the big test,” says DiPietro, technical manager for CO2 capture and separation at the Oil and Gas Technology Center in Oklahoma City. He says that the Norway test would require 80 tons of amino silicone solvent and capture as much as 1,600 pounds of C02 per hour.

That would be big step for Perry and the team, who started a solving the problem of CO2 capture a decade ago with just beakers in his chemistry lab. “We’ve started moving pretty fast,” he says.

GE’s Bob Perry. Image credit: GE Global Research

Perry says that amino silicones work like a conveyor belt. They efficiently glom on to CO2 gas at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 Celsius) and release CO2 after the mixture is heated to 250 F (121 C). The system then cools down the material and it returns to trap more gas.

Unlike conventional carbon capture methods, Perry’s process doesn’t need any water. “This is where the money is,” he says. “If you need to boil water to drive off the CO2, you are facing an enormous energy drain. The existing technology will increase your cost of electricity by 80 percent. You almost have to build a plant that’s twice as large to power the scrubber and still send some electricity to the consumer.” Perry and his team have filed several patents for their method.

The “big test” will take place at the $1 billion Mongstad facility. It will require 80 tons of amino silicones. Image credit: GE Global Research

They also designed an amino silicone molecule that’s large and heavy and doesn’t escape from the smokestack. “Our solvent is really big with high molecular weight,” he says. “Its size keeps it in the process.

The U.S. Department of Energy is running these tests because it wants the future cost of CO2 capture to be no higher than 35 percent of what it costs now. Perry says that “anyone who can get under 50 percent might be doing really well.”

Besides coal-fired power plants, Perry and DiPietro are already looking at “near-term” applications at cement plants, steel mills, small power plants and other CO2 emitters.

By Alaynah Boyd

The island of Saint Helena is one of the world’s most remote places. Surrounded by the deep, cold waters of the South Atlantic, the British territory is famous for serving as the final exile of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and the place where he drew his last breath. There are 4,250 people living on the volcanic outcrop, which Napoleon dubbed “this cursed rock.” Their only link to the world has been a five-day ride on packet ship that arrives once every three weeks.

But that’s about the change. Last week, the first plane touched down on the island’s first runway. Workers have also started putting the finishing touches on St. Helena's very first airport, which will open up the island to tourists and history buffs and break its isolation.

The first plane ever landed on St. Helena in September 2015. All images credits: St. Helena Access Office.

Last week’s touchdown was the beginning of a series of landings designed to calibrate the landing strip, which is perched atop a steep cliff overlooking fierce Atlantic breakers.

One partner helping local authorities with the project was AviaSolutions, a unit of GE Capital Aviation Services’ (GECAS). GECAS is one of the core financing units that will remain part of GE after the company’s planned exit from banking.

The airport is scheduled to open in 2016, when the carrier Comair Limited will start weekly flights from Johannesburg, South Africa, with a brand-new Boeing 737-800.

When that happens, the island that kept Napoleon in won’t be able to keep the world out.

By Conor McKechnie

Ordering stuff online and having it shipped to your house is now as common as breathing air. But the Taiwanese manufacturer of biologics, JHL Biotech, recently upped the ante and ordered an entire high-tech pharmaceuticals factory. Made by GE in Germany, Sweden and the U.S., the components for the world’s largest single-use modular plant for making biopharmaceuticals, which the company calls KUBio, recently left Europe for JHL’s new site in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei Province.

When the sixty-two completed modules that make up the factory reach the destination at Wuhan’s Biolake Science Park , they will help JHL make affordable biologics for markets where they are otherwise prohibitively expensive.

Biologics, also called biopharmaceuticals, are a new class of medicines made from strings of complex proteins. They are now leading the charge against disease and represent the fastest growing class of drugs. They range from synthetic insulin to medicines that can be used to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases.

“Our vision is to make world-class biopharmaceuticals affordable and accessible to all patients,” says Racho Jordanov, JHL’s chief executive. “This revolutionary modular facility is part of the realization of our vision in Asia, where US-made biopharmaceuticals are out of reach, and there is a large unmet medical need.”

Manufacturing drugs in single-use disposable plastic containers eliminates the need for costly cleaning and sterilization. It means that facilities can be smaller, and more efficient. They can be also configured to switch quickly between different drugs.

GE Healthcare’s KUBIo includes everything from bioprocessing equipment to the building and overall project coordination. The modules at the site arrive 80 to 90 percent pre-equipped with the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, the clean room, most of the utility equipment, and all of the piping necessary to run the plant.

“It’s really very innovative and different, because today 98 percent of biopharma factories are still stick-built, meaning you design and construct the building first, then it takes around a year to get it up and running,” says Olivier Loeillot, general manager at GE Healthcare Life Sciences Asia. “Our concept is totally different because you do everything in parallel, which enables you to save up to one and half years in total [in design and construction]. This is really what is critical for companies developing biopharmaceuticals: speed.”

Once in China, GE will manage the plant’s assembly, validate the equipment and train JHL staff. The completed KUBio facility in Wuhan will have a floor space of approximately 2,400 square meters (nearly half the size of a football field) and will contain a number of 2,000-liter single-use bioreactors.

“Quality has to be built into the process,” JHL’s Jordanov says. “To control a complex process of biopharmaceutical manufacturing requires very sophisticated equipment, and very sophisticated buildings to put the equipment in.”

By Terrence Murray

Maintaining wind turbines is a critical but time-consuming business. Dedicated technicians must gather their gear, rope up and climb hundreds of feet above firm ground to inspect turbine blades and nacelles. “It’s a workout,” said Mike Bowman, an ultra-marathoner who leads sustainable energy projects at GE Global Research, after he climbed the 300-foot tower of GE’s new Ecorotr wind turbine in Tehachapi, Cal.

Bowman climbing the 300-foot ladder inside GE’s SpaceFrame tower in Tehachapi. Top GIF: This drone feed captures workers inspecting the nacelle of a wind turbine. Image credit: GE Reports

But help is on the way: unmanned aerial vehicles, a.k.a. drones. “We have been exploring the use of drones for all sorts of inspection areas,” Bowman says. “It’s pretty cool what you can do, especially with the auto-pilot type drones. The idea that you can get to very remote areas autonomously with pretty incredible visual access opens lots of opportunities.”

Lots indeed. With 270,000 wind turbines currently installed in the U.S., a dedicated operations and maintenance drone fleet could be a serious time and money saver for wind power companies.

Several GE crews have brought drones to Tehachapi, where GE is currently testing the Ecorotr, a more efficient wind turbine design.

Besides providing a high-res image feed, drones can also operate in some fairly nasty weather and seamlessly integrate their data with software analytics. The idea is getting so hot that the consulting firm Navigant Research believes that wind turbine drone sales and inspection services could grow into a $6 billion market by 2024.

GE Renewable Energy, one of the world’s largest wind turbine suppliers, recently used a UAV to shoot some dazzling, if dizzying, footage of GE turbines operating at GE’s testing facility in Tehachapi. Take a look.

By Mike Keller

New York has seen the lights go out in spectacular ways in recent years. Almost the entire state went dark during the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, and power outages sporadically shut down the 911 emergency services system. In 2008, more than 1.7 million upstate residents were plunged into darkness after a major ice storm split trees and crumbled the grid. And in 2012, Hurricane Sandy damaged power plants and equipment, shutting the power to millions of residents for days. These events - and the certainty of more in the future - have given the state plenty of reasons to look for new ways to prevent power loss in emergencies.

In the search for solutions, though, a major problem keeps popping up. The standard model for a region's electric grid is built around one or a few large plants producing electricity and shipping it often long distances on transmission lines to customers. If the plant or the line goes down, so does the grid. For authorities trying to overcome this structural issue, one idea is getting a serious look.

It's called a microgrid, and officials from Potsdam to Brooklyn are betting that the concept will keep the lights on the next time an unwelcome visitor threatens the flow of electricity to hospitals and other vital facilities.

“Much of New York's effort is predicated on resiliency,” says Lavelle Freeman, the manager of distribution, planning and engineering for GE's Energy Consulting business. “Sandy is just the most recent example that has people asking: what you do to prevent the grid from collapsing for an extended period of time?”

At its heart, a microgrid is a standalone power system embedded within a region's grid that can operate independently when a power outage starts. During a disruption, a microgrid acts as a powered island that keeps critical infrastructure like fire and gas stations, clinics and telecommunications systems running.

The idea encompasses more than just souped up backup generators; it's about rethinking how communities make and transmit power. Instead of relying solely on a central power plant that makes and ships current one way to consumers, it considers the idea that a community might be better served by also having multiple smaller producers distributed throughout it. These can be interconnected with underground power lines, which are protected from extreme conditions above ground.

Besides increasing the system's resilience by embedding physically separated generators around town, the microgrid concept also opens the door for municipalities to create a broader portfolio of energy sources. A microgrid could include solar panels, hydroelectric or wind projects, fast-starting natural gas engines and wood-waste generators all feeding into a local grid.

With the U.S. Department of Energy actively studying them and a growing interest from around the world, New York's state leaders have decided to push for microgrids to become a reality. In July, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that 83 communities had each been awarded $100,000 in a competition called NY Prize to study the feasibility of installing community microgrids. The results of these studies are due next February.

"New Yorkers have first-hand experience regarding the need for resilient and efficient power systems that can withstand whatever Mother Nature has in store for us," Cuomo said in a statement. "This funding will help communities across New York invest in these new systems, which will ensure critically important institutions such as police and fire stations, hospitals and schools can continue operating during and in the aftermath of an extreme weather event.”

GE Energy Consulting’s technical director Bahman Daryanian says the important thing about standing up a microgrid is that the whole system must be able to provide the exact amount of electricity needed to all of the facilities connected to it when the rest of the grid goes down. But creating these systems need not require reinventing the wheel: The beginnings of a microgrid architecture already exist in a lot of places — many hospitals and universities have emergency generators that switch on whenever grid power goes down.

Daryanian says that upping the capacity of these installations so they can pump power out to other facilities when needed could provide a sturdy foundation for a microgrid. “Hospitals and the like are already existing pockets of resilience,” he says. “They may already have a base production that can power the hospital, but we could upgrade them so they spread power to surrounding gas stations and other places for up to two weeks when the power goes down. Many of these sites are already using GE distributed power technology.”

Of the 83 ongoing feasibility studies that bring together public and private expertise, GE is taking part in nearly a dozen spread throughout the state from New York City to the Capital Region. Each focuses plans on a critical facility within the community whose power production could be augmented and extended outward. GE’s experts are determining how much power would need to be produced during normal operations and in an emergency. They are also planning to design the microgrid in such a way, so that it could operate in parallel with the main grid and provide extra power during times of peak electricity demand, like when everyone has their air conditioning running in the middle of summer.

GE is consulting on the earliest stages of microgrid development to help government energy researchers, utilities and their customers understand “how to hook all this equipment and technology together without breaking anything,” says Freeman.

By Mike Keller

Dr. Ella Kazerooni knows a thing or two about looking for lung cancer. As the chair of the American College of Radiology's committee on lung cancer screening, she has been at the forefront of giving doctors the tools they need to diagnose high-risk patients early.

One of those tools for which she has long been fighting to use is low-dose computed tomography (CT), which images the body in virtual slices using x-rays. She was convinced of their benefit by a massive study called the National Lung Screening Trial that compared two different types of screening. It involved 53,000 heavy smokers aged 55 to 74 years who ran a high lung cancer risk. The study found that people who underwent an annual low-dose CT scan were 20 percent less likely to die from lung cancer than those screened with a standard chest x-ray.

“Bringing low dose CT screening to patients at a high risk for lung cancer will reduce death from the most deadly cancer worldwide,” she said. Indeed, decreasing mortality by the percentage seen in the lung screening trial could keep as many as 32,000 people alive of the more than 158,000 expected by the American Cancer Society to die of lung cancer this year in the U.S. alone.

Top, above and below: Illustrative CT lung images showing lung nodules (upper right corner in the top image). These images were not acquired as part of low dose CT lung cancer screening and are not representative of typical screening images. They have been post-processed using software applications that are not necessary for lung cancer screening. Image credit: GE Healthcare

This significant improvement in lung cancer patient outcomes arises from the ability of doctors to use CT to detect small lung nodules that they can’t see on standard x-rays.

Recognizing these abnormalities while they are still small allows doctors to detect lung cancer in its earliest stages when it can be more effectively treated and cured. CT can also be used to more accurately measure a nodule’s change in size over time—a key diagnostic parameter since malignant nodules grow faster than benign ones. Catching the disease early is often the difference between life and death for sufferers. The overall five-year lung cancer survival rate is just 17 percent, among the most deadly of all cancers. But chances improve greatly when it is found at an early stage, with the five-year survival rate at 54 percent. i, ii

Unfortunately, up until recently, doctors who wanted to use CT scanners to look for the early signs of lung cancer had to go it alone—since the machines weren't sanctioned to be used for that purpose by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As a result, doctors couldn't ask scanner manufacturers how best to use the equipment for lung screening.

“Performing low dose CT with attention to high image quality at the lowest radiation exposure to detect early cancer is at the core of a successful screening program, and requires collaboration with the entire imaging community to bring technology to bear for this purpose,” said Kazerooni.

GE Healthcare knew that collaborating with customers on low dose CT lung cancer screening was critical to customers’ success in setting up effective screening programs. A cross-functional team spent countless hours gathering data to submit to the FDA and just recently announced that GE Healthcare was the first company to receive FDA clearance for low dose CT lung cancer screening. It's also the first time in history that any CT device has received FDA clearance for any screening indication.

“The National Lung Screening Trial really gave doctors and healthcare organizations the clinical evidence they needed to urge the FDA to clear CT scanners for lung cancer screening,” says Ken Denison, the molecular imaging and CT dose leader at GE Healthcare, one of the major manufacturers of CT machines. “Lung cancer kills more people annually than the next three deadliest cancers combined. So reducing the mortality rate by 20 percent is definitely one of the most important direct health impacts CT screening can have.”

Using low dose CT for screening was initiated when the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recommended the use of low dose CT lung cancer screening for high-risk individuals. Medicare will now reimburse eligible beneficiaries who undergo the test.iii

Denison says there is still a while to go before the switch from old-fashioned x-rays to CT scans is complete. “If history is any guide, this could take five to 10 years before diagnosticians generally use CT for lung cancer screening instead of chest x-rays in the U.S.,” he says. “To get to the point of saturation, that tends to be how slowly adoption moves. The important thing is that doctors can now begin to take advantage of this great technology.”

By Tomas Kellner

Silicon and carbon are reluctant partners. Although the two elements are among the most abundant on Earth, they almost never bond in nature and it takes a lot of heat and pressure in the lab to coax them into working with each other. But when they do stick together and form a material called silicon carbide (SiC), it’s something to see.

“SiC is a key building block for next-generation devices,” says Danielle Merfeld, global technology director at GE Global Research. “It takes features from diamond, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with features of silicon, our ubiquitous semiconductor technology in electronics, and takes the best of those to make a very new kind of material for power electronics. SiC can more efficiently handle higher voltages and three times the amount of energy compared to silicon chips. Suddenly, you can run everything from locomotives to planes and wind farms faster, hotter and more efficiently.”

For example, retrofitting a datacenter with SiC chips would make it 5 percent more efficient. The technology could allow aircraft makers to shed 1,000 pounds from a passenger jet, reduce the weight of a locomotive by 5 percent, cut power losses inside wind and solar inverters by half, and make hybrid electric vehicles consume 10 percent less fuel.

GE - together with the SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, the New York State and other industry partners - is now building a new SiC foundry  in Utica, N.Y. The company, which has been working on SiC for almost 25 years, also contributed intellectual property valued at $100 million to get the project on its way.

GE Reports recently visited Merfeld’s GRC lab. Take a look.

GE started working with SiC in 1991. The first product was a hardy UV photodiode that could withstand the infernal heat inside a gas turbine and monitor the flame. The latest products include power electronics that can handle the hot and harsh environment inside oil wells, aboard planes and ships, and under the hood of hybrid electric cars.

Manufacturing a silicon carbide chip requires over 200 steps performed in a clean room, and companies have to negotiate pitfalls opened by the complicated interactions between silicon, carbon and metal oxides. The images above and in the top GIF show one of the first fabrication steps: using spin coating to deposit a thin layer of photoresist that allows workers to pattern the wafer.

The very first SiC application a century ago was as an abrasive. Today, the material’s hardy constitution gives SiC chips excellent reliability and potential lifespans of 100 years. This comes handy in deep-sea oil wells or offshore wind turbines, which must perform without a hitch for long periods of time.

The New York foundry will manufacture SiC chips on 6-inch wafers with more than double the wafer area, compared to standard 4-inch technology. The larger size will help cut costs and scale production. The GIFs above show microscopes inspecting chips on an SiC wafer. 

GE makes SiC chips called MOSFETs - metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistors. They help manage power inside machines and can handle temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius (392 Fahrenheit), where ordinary silicon would fail. Above is a partially processed 6-inch wafer in the early stages of patterning. 

An SiC wafer like this one can hold hundreds of chips. They can handle over 1,000 volts and up to 100 amps. The picture above shows a finished wafer with individual MOSFET chips.

A close up view of a power module - in teal - showing three SiC MOSFETs with their power and signaling connections. The module is a key building block for power electronics systems. It processes raw electrical power into clean sine waves that customers can use.

GE engineers are working with two flavors of SiC power modules. Unlike the teal power module with its silver wire bond connections, the yellow module above has no wire bonds. “The SiC MOSFET is a high-performance device,” says Ljubisa Stevanovic, advanced technology leader at GE Global Research. "In an automotive analogy, it's a racecar engine that's much faster than conventional devices. The teal module shows the sturdy, conventional design that’s built like a pickup truck. But the yellow module above has no wire bonds. It’s like a Formula 1 chassis. It really allows us to go fast.”

“In applications requiring high speed we use SiC modules without wire bonds, which deliver amazing performance,” Stevanovic says. The golden rectangles are transistors and the silver squares are diodes. 

By Jon Blauvelt

We’ve all stood in the dark at least once after getting tripped up by power-hungry appliances. Typically, the remedy is just steps away: a quick flip of the circuit breaker switch, and you’re back in business.

It’s a simple fix, but it involves complex physics. “Circuit breakers protect our homes from electricity overload,” says Tim Ford, senior product manager for industrial circuit breakers at GE’s Industrial Solutions business. “This sounds easy, but the amount of energy they are often called on to dissipate is like grabbing the flywheel of a running car and stopping it.”

Ford should know. His team builds breakers that can disconnect a small power plant. Their latest device, called the GuardEon Molded Case Circuit Breaker, will be able to dissipate 2.7 megawatts. That’s enough horsepower to stop seven Porsche 911 Turbos cold in their tracks – if you could fit them inside a shoebox. The breaker is unusual since the team used powerful software for the first time to build a virtual prototype of the device - its “digital twin” - and tested it inside a computer.

After they ran the digital twin through tests inside the computer, they exposed a real-world GuardEon prototype to 100,000 amps at 480 volts. The breaker survived the short circuit. Image credit: GE Energy Management

It’s a numbers game taken to new extremes. The circuit breaker must withstand an electric arc – essentially a lightning-like discharge - that can reach temperatures as high as 19,500 degrees Celsius (28,600 Fahrenheit). That’s more than three times the temperature on the surface of the sun. In addition, the circuit breaker must withstand pressure of 17 to 20 atmospheres, the equivalent of diving 660 feet below the surface of the sea.

The breaker must also control the molten metal particulates created by the arc and handle electromagnetic forces reaching as much as 5 tons - the weight of an African elephant. All of this happens in less than a second in a volume smaller than the cavity of a microwave oven.

Another GuardEon prototype just before a short-circuit test. Image credit: GE Energy Management

“When we design these devices, we can’t just pull out the circuit breaker design 101 book from college and look at formulas because the formulas don’t exist and that book is far from being written,” Ford says.

That’s why Ford’s business partnered with software engineers at GE Global Research Center and the University of Connecticut and designed GuardEon inside a computer. They’ve been using a customized version of the commercially available software ANSYS to build the “digital twin” that will enable them to study the effects of design changes with a level of detail that has been impossible to achieve through physical sampling and testing.

GE engineers in Plainville, CT, are using software to model and test GuardEon’s digital twin. Image credit: GE Energy Management

The team can use the model to simulate the electromagnetic, mechanical and fluid dynamic aspects of circuit breaker behavior and study their interplay. The preliminary use and adaptation of the “digital twin” also allows them to reach higher performance levels and move faster in bringing the device to the market.

“Multi-physics-simulation modelling helps us narrow down 10-15 different designs into three or four that we can use for physical testing and validation,” says Dhirendra Tiwari, principal engineer and technologist at GE’s Industrial Solutions business. “Without these capabilities, we’d have to send all of the samples to the lab for development and testing and then go from there. This is expensive and time consuming.”

This is not the first GE digital twin. The company is already using the approach to design more efficient wind turbines and even entire wind farms.

By Tomas Kellner

Try as he might, Vlatko Vlatkovic won’t make the sun shine brighter. So when he wanted to make a more efficient solar farm, he and his team had to go for the next best thing: a gray plastic box the size of a small hut called the inverter. “It takes direct current from the PV panels and turns it into alternating current that you can use,” says Vlatkovic, chief engineering officer at GE Power Conversion. “Since the inverter system also represents as much as 20 percent of the capital costs of the farm, you could make a huge impact if you made it more efficient.”

That’s what Vlatkovic and his team just did. Using new power electronics, they increased their inverter’s power output by 50 percent by raising the voltage it can handle by half – from 1,000 volts to 1,500 - compared to the industry standard. The result is one of the most efficient utility-scale inverters in the world.

The inverter can also process power from solar installations generating 4 megawatts, instead of the typical 1-megawatt market offering. As a result, solar farms can replace four inverters with one and save an estimated $6 million in capital expenditures for a 200-megawatt farm. “The new design allows us to send much more power through the same amount of copper and get big economies of scale,” Vlatkovic says. “You won’t need as many fans, filters, concrete pads and other components for the farm infrastructure. You can change the farm’s architecture.”

America’s NextEra Energy Resources LLC just announced that it would use the inverters at its solar farms located across the U.S. “In making our choice, we insisted on having a technology that would not only be dependable and reliable, but that would also help make our offering increasingly cost competitive while yielding optimized productivity,” said Armando Pimentel, President and CEO of NextEra Energy Resources. The forecast for solar power looks bright. According to industry studies, the global installed photovoltaic capacity will grow by more than 200 gigawatts over the next three years. North America alone will add 11 gigawatts. (By comparison, the world’s 438 nuclear power plants have net installed capacity of 379 gigawatts.)

Vlatkovic and his team originally developed the inverter - GE calls it LV5 1500V - for Alstom’s offshore wind farms. But the team soon realized that the device could be also useful to solar farm operators.

Vlatko Vlatkovic and his team are working to make the future of solar energy look brighter.

But this synergy is just the beginning. Next versions of the inverter will likely include chips from a hardy but tough to manufacture material called silicon carbide (SiC). SiC chips could boost the device’s efficiency by 1 to 2 percent. Utilities spend billions to get that much gain from a new gas turbine,” Vlatkovic says. (A smaller, 1-megawatt SiC inverter from GE is already working in Germany.)

SiC takes the best features from diamond, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with the properties of silicon, which is inside every computer and every smart phone. However, making a SiC chip involves up to 300 discrete steps in a clean room. “When I started it wasn’t ready, but today SiC chips can have applications just about anywhere,” Vlatkovic says.

Vlatkovic is one of GE’s silicon carbide mavens. A decade ago, he helped launch SiC research program at GE Global Research in New York, before moving to design power electronics at GE Oil & Gas and GE Energy Management. He has seen the technology mature from lab to products. SiC chips could make everything from locomotives, planes and wind turbines much more efficient.

GE calls this transfer of people, knowledge and technology between businesses the “GE Store.” Such sharing involves many combinations of products and businesses: gas turbines benefit from jet engine know-how while medical scanners can inspect oilfield equipment.

“The technology has evolved,” Vlatkovic says about the new inverter. “This is the next generation.”

By Terrence Murray

GE's newest HArriet 9HA gas turbine can generate up to 600 megawatts of electricity in a combined cycle power plant, the equivalent amount needed to supply an American city (approximately 600,000 U.S. homes). To do so efficiently, however, the turbine must withstand infernal internal temperatures topping 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,430 Celsius) - near the melting point of steel.

Over the long term, the heat causes wear that is impossible to see without a virtual model of the turbine operating at full capacity. To get a peek inside, GE started working with Cascade Technologies, maker of powerful simulation software that can model complex heat flows.

Frank Ham, Cascade president and CEO, says his software is the equivalent of a modern-day digital microscope. "Seeing details they were not aware of helps engineers better understand why gas turbine designs work the way they do, and GE gains critical knowledge as to how they can improve them," Ham says.

Cascade developed powerful software to model turbulent combustion. The program allows the company to monitor temperature (top GIF) and track pollutants like CO, NOx, and CO2 (see bottom GIF). GIF credits: Cascade Technologies

Cascade is a spin-off from the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University. Its software gives GE engineers a virtual peek inside HArriet (see below) - the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine - and assist them with building the next generation of machines.

The software can run on some of the world’s most powerful computers, including supercomputers operated by U.S. national labs. It is able to handle petabytes of data, roughly four times the amount of information held by the U.S. Library of Congress. (GE Aviation is also using supercomputers to design more efficient jet engines.)

The software allows engineers to simulate multiple-step combustion processes inside the turbine and other complex scenarios at the microsecond level. The team can use the results to make changes and improvements to new turbine designs up to ten times faster over the course of a typical two-year product development process. That means more robust, efficient and cleaner turbines, delivered faster, says John Lammas, vice president of power generation engineering at GE Power & Water.

Says Cascade’s Ham: “By providing information that goes into design decisions, we can help improve efficiency, lower emissions and increase durability in future products.”

By Tomas Kellner

Today the European Commission approved GE’s proposed acquisition of the power and grid assets of the French industrial company Alstom.

Over the last year, GE, which makes everything from CT scanners to jet engines and power plant turbines, has been bulking up its industrial core, investing in software and connecting machines to the Industrial Internet, and selling its banking assets that once contributed more than a half of its revenues.

The company plans to add more big iron to its portfolio by acquiring Alstom’s businesses making power generation and grid equipment. GE estimates that by 2018, with an expected additional $0.15-$0.20 per share of earnings from Alstom, its industrial businesses will generate more than 90 percent of GE’s operating earnings, up from 58 percent in 2014.

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GE first made its bid for Alstom’s assets public in April 2014. Over the last 15 months, the company has secured numerous regulatory approvals, yet still preserved the core of the deal: Alstom’s complementary technology and geographic reach, its 500 gigawatt installed base, and broad renewables and grid portfolios. “This deal is a critical step in GE’s transformation into the world’s premier industrial company,” said Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, in a comment on the decision.

Immelt said the approval gave GE a clear pathway to close the deal as early as possible in the fourth quarter. The company will work on finalizing the commitments associated with the proposed remedies, which include divesting a segment of Alstom’s gas turbine business and its after-market parts and services business (see more details here).

GE expects about $3 billion in cost synergies from the deal when the Alstom assets are fully integrated. “The more we learned about Alstom’s technology and capabilities over the last 15 months, the more we like the deal,” Immelt said. “It’s the right deal at the right time for GE.”

GE, which is quickly becoming a digital industrial company, will use big data and analytics to improve performance of Alstom’s installed base. Alstom’s expertise and technology will also enrich the GE Store, which allows know-how to quickly spread across GE businesses. The company will also gain local resources and reach power customers in more than 150 countries.

By Mark Egan

When Christine Furstoss joined GE 26 years ago, she was a hands-on materials scientist who made new turbine parts. She remembers it as a painstaking, arduous and often frustrating process.

“Two decades ago, if I had to change a material in a power generation turbine, it could take years,” she says from GE Global Research (GRC) in Niskayuna, NY, where serves as global technology director responsible for developing a new manufacturing concept GE calls the Brilliant Factory. “We would sit down and start by looking at paper drawings, ask questions, pull out our handbook of materials and figure out what was best after lots of discussions.” (You can read a Q&A with Furstoss about the Brilliant Factory here.)

But the handbooks and drawings of old have now given way to a vision of the future in the Brilliant Factory Lab at the GRC. In a darkened room, engineers can gather to look through 3D glasses to gauge how close a digitally rendered production of a design is to its original specifications. Nearby a robot inspects an aircraft blade for any imperfections with great precision.

The lab is a prototype of the new $73-million Brilliant Factory that is coming to life in Greenville, S.C., where GE makes huge gas turbines for power plants. That facility will use new production processes like additive manufacturing and advanced materials like Ceramic Matrix Composites (CMCs).

The Greenville factory, which is set to open in November, could save $100 million over three years, compared with traditional facilities, by decreasing design expenses and savings on sourcing and manufacturing. “The speed of change that I see, to me, defines this as a revolution — it is not just one change but a culture change,” Furstoss says.

Elements of the concept are already at work in Pune, India, where GE opened its first “flexible” multi-modal plant last year. Workers at the plant, which covers an area equivalent of 38 football fields, will make parts for jet engines, locomotives, wind turbines, water treatment units and also the oil and gas and agriculture industries all under one roof. “The plant will allow us to quickly adjust production as demand comes in, using the same people and space,” said  Banmali Agrawala, president of CEO of GE South Asia.

The shift to the Brilliant Factory is being driven by advances on three key fronts — data, connectivity and materials. Engineers and designers can use sensors to harvest huge amounts of data on factory floors, securely pool it in the cloud and analyze it by powerful software. New materials and rapid prototyping tools like 3D printing have also shortened the time needed to build prototypes of new parts and machines. “We can get parts through factories faster with higher confidence because we are always learning and these improvements lead to us being more cost effective, which boosts the bottom line,” Furstoss says.

For example, using 3D printing, tool production that once took six months now takes three weeks, and “agile,” computer-guided welding can increase productivity four fold. Globally, every single percentage point increase in factory productivity could save GE an estimated $500 million per year.

Furstoss says the Brilliant Factory is also possible because of the GE Store - the sharing of ideas and expertise between GE’s various businesses. For example,  ultrasound technology from GE Healthcare is now used in factories to inspect blades for wind turbines. “We can inspect parts as they are being made, using the same ultrasound technology we use in our medical machines,” she says.

The Brilliant Factory also allows teams to work better together. For example, now that parts are designed digitally, designers can share their ideas earlier with manufacturers, get feedback, and 3D print new prototypes sooner.

Furstoss says the biggest challenge her team is facing involves developing common tools — software and IT infrastructure — so designers, manufacturers and field engineers can collaborate in immersive environments over cloud-based computer platforms. She is working with other companies to develop common standards backed by the federally funded Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute. 

By Tomas Kellner

After Paris and Oshkosh, the world airshow tour has moved to Moscow in August. GE introduced at the show for the first time a new H85 turboprop engine for next-generation propeller planes like the L-410 NG made by Aircraft Industries.

GE makes its turboprop engines at a gleaming factory on the outskirts of Prague, the Czech capital. Designed to work in desert heat as well as Siberian chill, the rugged engines power thousands of planes around the world including those flying to the world’s most dangerous airport in Lukla, at the foot of Mt. Everest.

This week, GE Reports visited the century-old business, which the company acquired in 2008, to see how the engines are made and tested. Take a look.

The compressor rotor that is the beating heart of the engine.

Although workers use computer-controlled machines to manufacture the complicated shapes and geometries of engine parts, some components, like turbine and compressor blades, still need the human touch to reach perfection.

A worker is finishing an impeller for GE’s H80 engine.

This tool allows workers to precisely position diffuser blades before assembly (below).

The final product: GEH80 engine (above). These engines  power commuter planes, cropdusters as well as private aircraft all over the world .

The factory in Prague has been making aircraft engines for nearly a century. Many of its products come back for servicing with technical documents still located in period packaging.

A worker is applying paint to a refurbished H80 engine.

The GE plant in Prague also has several engine testing cells. Workers take each machine for a spin before it travels back to the customer.

An H80 engine inside a test cell. Customers can test their engines with a variety of propellers.

GE used to ship engines inside these metal barrels. But workers have figured a new, more environmentally friendly way to ship engines inside recyclable boxes made of wood and reinforced cardboard (below).

GE’s latest turboprop engine, the H85, will be powering planes like the next-generation L-410 NG from Aircraft Industries. Take a look at a video from the plane’s maiden flight. 

Finally, here’s how GE turboprop engines work.

By Mike Keller

At the most fundamental level, we are all code. The typical human body is an assembly of some 37 trillion cells, and each holds all the information needed to make a complete human being.

Our DNA, the double-stranded helix responsible for heredity, contains 3 billion letters that dictate everything from hair and skin color to blood type. In fact, DNA is the most important identity document we will ever carry. Besides random mutations and damage, it doesn’t change from the day we’re born.

But that paradigm may soon start to shift. Scientists around the world have been experimenting with a powerful new tool called the CRISPR-Cas9 system, which has begun to open up the possibility of rewriting faulty or unwanted human, animal and plant DNA.

“We now have a way of easily making changes directly to the genome,” says Anja Smith, the research and development director at Dharmacon, a unit of GE Healthcare Life Sciences developing technologies for gene expression and editing, including CRISPR-Cas9. “You can now go directly into the cell itself and make changes to genes.”

Top image: A DNA illustration. Image credit: Getty Images. Above: An HIV virus attacking a cell. Image credit: Shutterstock

A Revolution in the making

Genetic engineering has advanced rapidly since the 1970s, when scientists first combined snips of DNA from one bacterium or virus with another. The genetic blueprints for life are almost entirely written in a seemingly simple language whose alphabet has just four letters, which stand for four different molecules called nucleic acids: A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine and T for thymine.

Sequences of these letters spell out what we call genes, the basic units for inherited traits like blue eyes or the blood disorder hemophilia.

The ability to start reading that code, called DNA sequencing, took off in the 1970s and began accelerating in the 1980s. By 2003, scientists from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the private firm Celera Genomics announced they had sequenced the first essentially complete human genome.

If genetic engineering were a race, everything that preceded decoding the human genome was only a trip to the starting line.

After that, the tempo picked up quickly. There was the phenomenal discovery that allowed scientists to effectively stop genes from working, a process called RNA interference. This allowed researchers to start silencing targeted genes, turning them off to see what would happen and learn what they do. That led to a torrent of findings that started to reveal exactly which genes are associated with disorders ranging from cancers to neurodegenerative diseases. The technique won its discoverers, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, a Nobel Prize in 2006.

Along the way, researchers also began refining the difficult technique of inserting foreign DNA sequences into host genomes, getting the host cell to follow the foreign instructions and produce entirely foreign proteins. The finding allowed biopharmaceutical companies to create bacteria that could mass-produce the hormone insulin outside the human body.

In 2012, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna revealed the CRISPR-CAS9 system, which allows researchers to go deeper and precisely edit and fix individual genes. Their groundbreaking work has triggered the next revolution in genetic engineering.

An image of a bacteria. Image credit: Getty Images

A tailor with a pair of scissors, sewing needle and thread

In the early 2000s, biologists realized that bacteria and their microscopic cousins, archaea, had short sequences of letters that showed up over and over again in their own DNA. These came to be known as “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or CRISPRs.

It turned out that the sequence of letters between these CRISPRs were actually parts of foreign DNA from viruses, which had previously attacked the bacterium. After defeating the virus, the bacterium incorporated a piece of the invading DNA into its own to recognize the next time it was under attack.

This bacterial acquired immunity defense system was a clever cut-and-paste job. The scissors were the bacterium’s DNA-cutting protein called Cas9. The pasted bit included DNA information identifying the virus.

Scientists figured they could use this same system to target specific parts of any DNA to cut and splice in new sequences at precise locations. They’ve also learned how to use the system to silence genes, activate silenced genes, and to add in sequences for whole new functions.

So far, CRISPR-Cas9 has proven to be extremely versatile, effectively targeting, cutting and editing DNA in human cancer and stem cells, yeast, fish, rabbits, wheat, and other organisms. “If you design an RNA sequence that’s 20 letters long that corresponds to the part of the DNA you want to edit, you can direct the CRISPR-Cas9 system to make a double-strand break anywhere in DNA,” Smith says. “It’s an easy way to knock out genes to help understand what they do, but it also allows an easy way to create insertions that are very precise and could be used to treat disease. This discovery has totally reinvigorated the potential of gene therapy, and somebody is going to win a Nobel Prize for it.”

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DNA base pairs: Millions of pairs of just four nucleic acids- Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine - form the DNA. Image credit: Getty Images

The gene-editing technology is still being developed and businesses like Dharmacon are helping speed up the research process. The GE unit has recently released a product called Edit-R - editor, get it? - which drops from weeks to days the time it takes to build the genetic sequence the system uses to guide the Cas9 cutting protein to the exact spot along the target DNA. “We’re removing the steps that are required to save researchers time,” Smith says. “Edit-R is also more amenable to higher-throughput testing, which can be used to screen hundreds or thousands of genes at a time for biomedical research.”

Smith says rapid and accurate editing of genes opens up all sorts of research opportunities, from creating disease mutations for study to routes for new therapies against cancers, immune diseases and other ailments.

This gene-editing tool isn’t just expected to be useful against human disease; researchers plan to use it for improving crops and livestock and potentially even for projects like mosquito control. Revolutionary though CRISPR-Cas9 may be, such a powerful instrument to delete, insert or edit genes also comes with big ethical questions that are still being argued.

In April, Chinese scientists announced they had used the system to genetically alter human embryos for the first time. The revelation set off vigorous debate in scientific circles and among the general public. Should such powerful scientific tools be used to alter the DNA of a human before they are even born? If so, should that engineering be limited to fixing genetic mistakes that will lead to serious or fatal disorder, or can it be also used to augment people to have preferred traits?

Such concerns are still a ways off, but the case of the Chinese research is just the first in what will surely be more difficult questions now that genetic engineering is starting to look more like programming computer code.

By Mike Keller

Thailand’s star has been on the rise for quite some time. Within the span of a single generation, social and economic progress has propelled it from a low to upper-middle-income level and the country’s poverty rate has been cut almost in half. But while capital has been pouring in, reliable electricity is still hard to come by.

It’s the same story all over the developing world. Power plants are expensive and take time to build. In a place like Thailand, things get even more complicated—the country’s large cities are separated by long expanses of dense forest dotted by tiny villages.

Thailand has tackled electrification by implementing alternative energy projects and by demanding better energy efficiency, both by consumers and producers. Now, a Thai company called Gulf Energy Development has just announced the next big investment to supply the energy to Bangkok. It has placed an order for six cutting-edge GE gas turbines built especially to produce power in challenging situations.

“There is demand for power everywhere, but there is also demand for environmental responsibility,” says Sherif Mohamed, an engineer with GE Power & Water. “Nowadays, you need power, but you also need higher efficiency, flexibility and reliability in any power generation project.”

The gas turbines, which GE calls LM6000-PF+ (above and below), are highly efficient machines built around technology originally developed for aircraft engines.

Workers can install these “aeroderivatives” – the name hints at their aviation heritage - and start generating electricity in as little as three months, a feat GE most recently pulled off in Egypt.

The turbines operate with an industry-leading 56 percent efficiency and an burn both gas and liquid fuel. A single unit can pump out up to 58 megawatts of electricity, enough for the equivalent of 50,000 homes. Each unit has a small footprint of around 350 square meters so that it can be installed in places where space is limited.

Just like a jet engine on a runway, the turbines can quickly kick into high gear when power is needed. “For the Gulf Energy Development project, we should be able to reach full power - about 300 megawatts between all six units - from a cold start in 10 minutes,” says Nasser Chraibi, the product line manager at GE Power & Water. “Many places throughout the developing world need this kind of flexibility.”

The turbine’s winning attributes also stem from the fact that the expertise of four different GE businesses. The company calls this approach to innovation the GE Store. New jet engine technologies in the gas turbine come from GE Aviation. The gearbox that connects the turbine to the generator is being developed by GE’s Oil & Gas business. The generator and advanced control software comes out of GE Energy Management.