By GE Reports staff

Water scarcity has again become a hot topic as California and Texas lurch into their fourth year of drought and Brazil’s Sao Paulo may start rationing water in 2015. But in some parts of the world the lack of water has been a problem for as long as anyone can remember.

In Algiers, the capital of Algeria, residents could not depend on having enough water in their pipes to fill up their teapots for decades. But in 2008, the North African country built the continent’s largest desalination plant and tapped a huge body of water located on its doorstep: the Mediterranean Sea. Today, the plant, located in the central Hamma neighborhood, is using GE technology to supply the city with 53 million gallons of drinking water every day. That’s enough to satisfy one quarter of Algiers’ daily usage.

Engineers at GE’s Power & Water business can tick off many similar examples, where innovation and new technologies helped solve nagging water problems. They say that nano-scale membranes, high-tech filters, bioreactors and other systems are helping process and recycle 5 billion gallons of water every day in 130 countries. There are more projects in the pipeline. Motors, transformers and drives from GE Marine power one of the world’s largest desalination plants near Melbourne, Australia. They will also go inside the world’s largest wastewater treatment facility in Abu Dhabi.

Top GIF: If water desalination was only this easy. Above: All of Earth’s water fits into a sphere roughly 950 miles in diameter. GIF by Julian Glandder based on data from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The lack of water is a complex problem that affects almost every country. A recent U.N. report found that two-thirds of the world’s population could be vulnerable to water shortages and 1.8 billion people would be living in “countries or regions with absolute water scarcity” by 2025. No wonder water is a $450 billion global market.

Many water challenges spring from inefficient usage. Nearly 20 percent of global fresh water resources, for example, are swallowed by industrial installations like power plants, and refineries. In the U.S., the number is close to 45 percent. Yet only 6 percent is being reused.

That’s changing. In Texas, the U.S. utility Exelon is building two huge 1,000 MW power plants equipped with the latest GE power generation turbines cooled with air, rather than water. As a result, the plants will need just one tenth of the water amount typically required to cool such large installations, and save “millions of gallons” every day, according to Exelon’s spokesman Bill Harris.

As much as half the water on Earth is older than the solar system. 

The tech is also helping the environment. In New Zealand, GE’s ZeeWeed bioreactors are using high-tech membranes riddled with tiny holes just 40 nanometers wide to filter out protozoa, bacteria, sediment, and unwanted nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. They treat 50 million gallons of wastewater and agricultural runoff per day that used to threaten the Great Barrier Reef.

In Algiers, the Hamma facility has become a model for a dozen other desalination plants strung along the Algerian coast, where a third of country’s population lives. When it opened, it was the first large-scale water treatment facility to strip salt from seawater with a process called reverse osmosis. The process uses huge pressure to push saltwater molecules through a superfine filter that stops the salt and lets fresh water pass.

The plant has been a hit. “Hamma is something that links us to the society,” says Ali Nouioua, GE Power & Water manager and Algiers resident. “People don’t see just water, they see GE.”

GE’s water business is over 90 years old. The company used this 1922 film called Beyond the Microscope to explain the science of water formation. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

By GE Reports staff

Power management chips are like second-born kids. They do a lot of hard work, but don’t always get the recognition they deserve.

Like microchips inside computers and laptops, power management chips are pieces of semiconductor as small as a cornflake. But they move electricity (watts), not data (bytes). Their circuits help extend battery life and reduce power consumption for a broad range of devices: from smartphones and tablets to brain scanners and jet engines. They can make machines smaller, lighter, and more efficient.

The best ones are made from a hard material called silicon carbide, which was originally used for abrasives like sandpaper and still gives many skateboards their rough grip. It can work at temperatures that are twice the boiling point of water where ordinary silicon chips falter. They handle megawatts of power, an order of magnitude higher than silicon, and operate at much higher frequencies, which makes them much more efficient.

But until recently, they’ve also been very difficult to make.

Manufacturing a silicon carbide chip requires as many as 300 steps performed in a clean room, and companies have to negotiate pitfalls opened by the complicated interactions between silicon, carbon and metal oxides. (The full name of the device is silicon carbide metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor, or SiC MOSFET.)

But scientists at GE Global Research have figured out how to bypass silicon carbide’s limitations and came up with new ways to make power management chips that could revolutionize the power electronics industry and bring in big savings for users. They are providing their technology and intellectual property valued at more than $100 million to a power electronics manufacturing consortium created in Albany, NY, last summer.

GE manufactures silicon carbide chips inside a clean room at its lab in Niskayuna, NY.

The research consortium, which includes GE, New York State, the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, and other industry partners, will open a shared fabrication plant that will develop and produce silicon carbide power devices on six-inch wafers.

It may not sound like much, but for the power electronics industry this is a big deal. “This will dramatically open up silicon carbide applications,” says Danielle Merfeld, global technology director for electrical technologies and systems at GE Global Research. “We want people to come to New York and take advantage of the technology.”

Ljubisa Stevanovic, chief engineer for energy conversion at the GE lab’s advanced technology office, says that scaling up production from the current four-inch wafers to six inches will nearly triple the number of chips per wafer and reduce manufacturing costs by a factor of two. “This will be revolutionary,” he says. “We could soon compete with existing silicon chips on price with a better technology. Silicon carbide is more robust, requires much less cooling and can deliver cleaner power than ordinary silicon.”

GE plans to use the new fabrication plant to manufacture power management chips for its own machines ranging from oil and gas pumps to MRI scanners. The company will license its technology to other companies using the plant to bring products to market.

Merfeld and Stevanovic estimate that the chips could make trains, planes and automobiles run up to 10 percent more efficiently, reduce the energy footprint of data centers by 5 percent, and improve the efficiency of wind and solar farms by more than 1 percent.

Says Merfeld: “This opens a design window that did not exist before.”

By David Lurie

GE will sell most of its GE Capital assets by 2018, a move that will reshape the company and further the role of its industrial businesses as the principal source of GE’s earnings.

GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, who announced the plan this morning, has said he wants to “profoundly change the company” and “lead the next generation of industrial progress.” By 2018, GE’s industrial businesses will generate at least 90 percent of GE’s operating earnings, according to the CEO, up from 58 percent last year.

This news follows the IPO of Synchrony Financial, and last year’s announcements to sell GE’s appliances business and acquire Alstom’s power and grid assets.

Immelt said market conditions are favorable to pursue the sale of GE Capital assets over the next two years, but GE will keep the financing “verticals” that are specifically tied to its industrial units.

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GE plans to return the cash proceeds from the GE Capital sale – estimated at about $90 billion - to shareholders through share buybacks, dividends and an exchange of Synchrony Financial shares. The new plan will also reduce GE’s share count from 10.1 billion to 8-8.5 billion.

Immelt said he decided to act now because of a “commitment to allocate capital in ways that maximize shareholder value.” He said that GE’s industrial businesses generate higher returns on capital after more than a decade of multi-billion-dollar investments in technology and portfolio changes.

What will GE Capital look like moving forward? Immelt says that GE will retain its “vertical” financing businesses - GE Capital Aviation Services, Energy Financial Services and Healthcare Equipment Finance – which directly relate to its core industrial businesses.

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GE has begun executing on this new plan, announcing today the sale of the bulk of GE Capital Real Estate assets for approximately $26.5 billion.

The assets targeted for disposition, in addition to GE Real Estate, include most of the commercial lending and leasing segment, and all consumer platforms, including all U.S. and international banking assets. These businesses represent roughly $200 billion in ending net investment (ENI).

Since 2008, GE has reduced GE Capital’s ENI from a peak of $538 billion to about $363 billion at the end of 2014.

“We are completing another definitive and important move to reshape GE for the future,” Immelt said. “GE is a fast-growth, high-tech industrial company, built on the capabilities of the GE Store.”

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By Abeer Masood

Shahid Abdullah has been in business long enough to spot a good opportunity. Abdullah is the president of the Sapphire Group, one of Pakistan’s largest textile companies with 16,000 employees, $800 million in annual revenues, and a global base of customers. But when his country started running out of electricity a decade ago, he switched gears and built a large power plant in Muridke, just north of Pakistan’s second largest city Lahore. “Moving into power generation was a step that made sense,” he says. “Not just from a business perspective, but also in terms of realizing our mission and contributing to the development of the communities in which we work and live.”

Abdullah’s calculation was simple. Lack of power is one of Pakistan’s burning needs. Electricity consumption is growing by close to 8 percent, and peak power demand exceeds supply by more than 4 gigawatts (GW), a massive amount. But his journey was far from easy.

The Muridke Power Plant generates 234 megawatts (MW), but from the start in 2010 it grappled with fluctuating fuel costs, which make up some 85 percent of its operating expenses. Fuel savings of just 1 percent could boost its net income by as much as 20 percent, but the downside was equally steep.

Abdullah started looking for a solution and learned about the Industrial Internet, a digital network connecting, collecting and analyzing data from sensors installed inside machines, including turbines that produce electricity. “His answer was in numbers,” says Azeez Mohammed, president and CEO of GE Power Generation Services in the Middle East and Africa, who started talking to Abdullah in 2014.

Top: The Badshahi Mosque (King’s Mosque) in Lahore. Image credit: Muhammad Ashar Above: The Muridke Power Plant Image credit: Sapphire Group

Mohammed proposed to embed hundreds of sensors and other digital instruments in Abdullah’s turbines, analyze the data they collect, and use the information to improve the plant’s performance, optimize production and reduce unplanned downtime. But Abdullah was cautious. “The last thing I wanted was to be a guinea pig in GE’s ‘first-of-its-kind’ experiment,” he laughs.

GE’s Mohammed, however, was convinced that the project would work. So much so that he proposed Abdullah a deal: GE would pay for the sensors and the software and then split all benefits with Sapphire under a win-win scenario.

With Abdullah on board, GE dispatched a team of technicians and software engineers to Muridke. They spent a month developing a self-learning analytical model based on huge amounts of data from the gas turbines and other plant assets at Sapphire. The model allowed them to predict changes in efficiency, electricity output and other outcomes under different production scenarios without having to make any changes to the equipment itself.

Above: The control center at the Muridke Power Plant. Image credit: The Sapphire Group 

In October 2014 the team connected the system to the plant’s two GE 6FA gas turbines, which GE engineers specifically designed with the Industrial Internet in mind. By December that year, the Sapphire plant has started seeing the benefits.

The heart of the system is GE’s Predix software platform and an advanced analytics application called Asset Performance Management (APM). The app allows industrial assets talk seamlessly with each other in a secure manner, and uses analytics to make the equipment more efficient.

The GE team is now working to link power plant’s steam turbine to system. The software is so versatile it doesn’t mind that turbine was the Czech industrial company Skoda, not GE.

GE estimates the Industrial Internet could bring the Muridke Power Plant millions of dollars in benefits over the next decade.

The Muridke Power Plant is using two GE 6FA gas turbines. Image credit: GE Power & water

Others in Pakistan will benefit from the system as well. Electricity shortages, known locally as ‘load-shedding’, are an everyday reality that families and businesses have had to learn to cope with them. “Our entire daily routine, from the time we sit down to help our children with their homework to the time we iron our clothes, is determined by the load-shedding schedule,” says Zeba Zahid, a mother of three and resident of Lahore, one of the cities that benefits from the power produced at the Muridke Power Plant. “It’s especially difficult to deal with in the summer, when peak temperatures cross 45 degrees Celsius [113 Fahrenheit] and load-shedding often exceeds 12 hours a day.”

GE estimates that making Pakistan’s power plants smarter with data analytics and software could add 600 megawatts to the country’s power output without building a single new plant. That’s comparable to building an entirely new power plant.

Abdullah feels that he made a smart choice. “As far as I’m concerned, the benefits offered by Industrial Internet based solutions are real and immediate,” he says. “This is an opportunity that Sapphire and Pakistan cannot afford to miss out on.”

By GE Reports staff

If Dante were a railroad engineer, the Norden tunnel under Sierra Nevada’s Donner Pass would probably be his tenth circle of hell. Nicknamed the “Big Hole” and 90 years old, its unventilated shaft climbs 2,400 feet – more than twice the height of the Eiffel Tower – over a distance of 2 miles.

When locomotives emerge near the town of Norden, Calif., (elev. 6,939 ft.), they are hot and gasping for air like a horse at the end of a race. “It’s an extremely difficult section of track,” says Michael Anderson, who builds locomotives at GE Transportation. “The tunnel is only a couple of feet bigger than the locomotive. If a heavy freight train got stalled there, it could be dangerous for the crew.”

GE’s Tier 4 locomotive during testing in Pueblo, Colo. Image credit: Vincent Laforet

Anderson, who is responsible for the development of GE’s new Evolution Series Tier 4 locomotive, is making sure that it won’t happen. Last month, he and his team completed one year of targeted field-testing in what are traditionally the most difficult North American operating environments.

They’ve taken the engine through the Big Hole, a grueling sequence of 20 tunnels on the Cascade Line outside Eugene, Ore., the 6-mile-long Moffat tunnel near Denver, Colo., which burrows under the Continental Divide, and other famously taxing places.

The Tier 4 locomotive is the first freight train engine that meets the U.S. government’s strict Tier 4 emission standards. The locomotive’s design will cut particulate matter (PM) emissions by 70 percent and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions by 76 percent, compared to GE’s current Tier 3 machines.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet shot Tier 4 tests from a helicopter. Image credit. Vincent Laforet 

Some of the tests have also taken place at the Federal Railroad Administration’s high-altitude testing circuit near Pueblo, Colo., (elev. 5,000 feet).

“The site has over 20 miles of dedicated tracks and we can run loops all day long at up to 70 miles-per-hour,” Anderson says. “We can do some unique things and simulate high-speed, heavy haul and other conditions. When you get to higher altitude, you have less oxygen and more particulate matter. But these new locomotives use software that can automatically adjust the mix and maintain low emissions.”

The locomotive is the first freight train engine that meets the EPA’s strict Tier 4 standards. Image credit: Vincent Laforet

Since the end of 2013, GE’s Tier 4 locomotives have been to Pueblo several times – attracting dozens of train-spotters along the way from Erie, Pa., where they are being manufactured.

Anderson’s team measures NOx, particulate matter, hydrocarbons emissions, carbon monoxide, horsepower, traction and other performance benchmarks. Since the locomotive can be connected to the Industrial Internet, they also test its software during various modes of operation like long-distance and heavy-haul service.

Image credit: Vincent Laforet

The battery of tests includes running long, commercial trains with 130 container-laden cars, similar to trains ferrying goods from Los Angeles to Chicago, and from Chicago to New York. Another test has the locomotives pull heavy cars weighed down with rocks to approximate coal trains working in the Powder River basin in Montana and Wyoming. “We were testing new control systems that allow heavy trains to maintain traction and gain momentum when going uphill,” Anderson says.

Image credit: Vincent Laforet

There are still more high-altitude tests to come, but Anderson, who has been working on the Tier 4 locomotive for four and a half years, says the engines are performing better than expected, even in the hellish environment of the Big Hole. GE has already received orders 1,355 orders for the locomotives.

Says Anderson: “Thanks to the broad team of GE researchers and GE Transportation engineers, we’ve been able to take locomotive technology to a whole new level.”

A GE Tier 4 is heading into the Big Hole tunnel. Image credit: Mike Anderson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet, who famously climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, recently visited the testing facility outside of Pueblo. Laforet hired a helicopter to snap the photographs illustrating this story.

By GE Reports staff

The fist-sized piece of silver metal that houses the compressor inlet temperature sensor inside a jet engine is a part that’s bit obscure even for many aviation aficionados. Starting now, however, it’s becoming a symbol of one of the biggest changes sweeping jet engine design.

The housing for the sensor, known as T25, recently became the first 3D-printed part certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly inside GE commercial jet engines.

GE Aviation is currently working with Boeing to retrofit more than 400 GE90-94B jet engines – some of the world’s largest and most powerful - with the 3D printed part. The GE90 family of engines powers Boeing’s 777 planes.

But the 3D-printed housing won’t be an outlier for long. GE has already started flight tests with the next-generation LEAP jet engine, which holds 19 3D-printed fuel nozzles. The engine, which will power new narrow-body planes like the Boeing 737MAX and the Airbus A320neo, was developed by CFM International, a 50/50 joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran (Snecma).

Top and above: The 3D-printed housing for the T25 sensor. Located in the inlet to the high-pressure compressor, the sensor provides pressure and temperature measurements for the engine’s control system. Image credit: GE Aviation

GE is also developing 3D-printed fuel nozzles and other parts for the GE9X engine for Boeing’s new 777X aircraft. The GE9X will be the largest jet engine ever built.

Although the LEAP is still in testing and the GE9X in development, CFM has received more than 8,500 orders for the LEAP, and GE has received 700 for the GE9X. GE Aviation’s total backlog now exceeds $135 billion for both equipment and services, and the value of the backlog has grown by a quarter over the last two years alone.

A 3D-printed fuel nozzle for the LEAP. Image credit: CFM International

Both of the engines feature new materials like ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) and carbon-fiber fan blades. But parts made by 3D printing represent perhaps the most attention-grabbing breakthrough.

GE scientists have been experimenting with 3D printing and other “additive manufacturing” methods over the last decade. The company has made several key acquisitions in the space, such as buying Morris Technologies, started by 3D printing pioneer Greg Morris.

The 3 printer shoots a laser or electron beam into a thin layer of cobalt-chrome powder to make the part. Image credit: GE Aviation

Unlike traditional manufacturing methods that mill or cut away material from a metal slab to produce a part, additive manufacturing “grows” components directly from a CAD file using layers of fine metal powder fused together with an electron beam or laser. The method can produce complex parts that would be difficult or even impossible to make otherwise. It creates them in a fraction of the time, compared with traditional methods like machining and welding, and leaves behind little waste.

As a result, additive manufacturing allows engineers to replace complex assemblies with single parts that are lighter than previous designs, saving weight and boosting a jet engine’s fuel efficiency.

Additive manufacturing allows designers to create complex parts like this jet engine combustor, which would be very difficult to make on conventional machines. Image credit: GE Aviation.

The new 3D-printed housing, made from a cobalt-chrome alloy, protects the temperature sensor’s delicate electronics from icing and punitive airflows inside the engine.

It would normally take GE several years to design and prototype this part, but the GE team was able to shave as much as a year from the process. “The 3D printer allowed us to rapidly prototype the part, find the best design and move it quickly to production,” says Bill Millhaem, general manager for the GE90 and GE9X engine programs at GE Aviation. “We got the final design last October, started production, got it FAA certified in February, and will enter service next week. We could never do this using the traditional casting process, which is how the housing is typically made.”

Jonathan Clarke, program manager for the project, says that the team ended up with a faster and simpler design, and superior material properties. “Once we found a workable solution, it went straight to production,” Clarke says. “This technology is a breakthrough.”

By GE Reports staff

Last November, when GE invested in the drone technology company Airware, Alex Tepper, managing director at GE Ventures, said his company wanted to be part of the commercial drone space and “help it grow.”

He’s made good on that promise. Airware said today that GE became the first large enterprise customer for its brand new “operating system for commercial drones” called the Aerial Information Platform (AIP).

“We are currently developing drone solutions for our customers,” Tepper said. He said that drones could monitor thousands of miles of pipelines and railroads, survey off-shore oil rigs, and safely inspect transmission towers and power lines.

Above and below: Drones with Airware’s FlightCore brains (in red). Image credit: Airware

Airware, based in San Francisco, is the idea of American entrepreneur Jonathan Downey. The former pilot realized that while there have been many drone makers, there were very few standardized building blocks. “For the industry to take off, you need more than just an autopilot,” he said.

Downey’s solution was the AIP, which combines airborne and ground-based hardware and software with cloud-based management and analytics services.

Users can control their drones from a tablet. Image credit: Airware

The latest version of the system will allow users to manage their fleets, scale data collection and analysis, integrate the results with existing business software systems, and help meet safety, regulatory and insurance requirements, Airware says.

Downey says the system’s flexibility also allows customers to easily embrace thermal sensors, multispectral cameras, LiDAR and software apps from a vast ecosystem of third-party vendors. “Commercial drones will change the way we do our jobs, improve our decision-making, and save lives,” Downey says.

A drone flight path over a construction site. Image credit: Airware

Airware’s systems are already being used by drone manufacturers like France’s Delta Drone and Altavian, Allied Drones, and Drone America in the U.S. “We have been testing Airware’s product for a variety of applications in France, including mining surveys, precision agriculture, industrial inspection, and forestry,” said Christian F. Viguié, chairman and CEO of Delta Drone.

GE’s Alex Tepper (right) says his company is already exploring drone applications for customers. Image credit: GE Ventures

The potential repertoire of commercial drones is huge. They could be used for everything from infrastructure inspection and land management to environmental monitoring, surveying and mapping, precision agriculture, and running public safety, search and rescue and wildlife conservation missions. Aiware’s technology already took part in an anti-poaching exercise in a northern white rhino wildlife preserve in Kenya.

Says GE’s Tepper: “Drones have the ability to reduce downtime, increase safety, and provide more reliable operations for our customers and we believe that Airware is going to be a key partner in helping us deliver these solutions.”

GE believes commercial drones will have applications across many industries. Image credit: GE Ventures

By David Lurie

In his first earnings release following last week’s announcement that GE would sell most of its banking assets, Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said GE’s industrial profits grew by 9 percent during the first quarter of 2015. Industrial earnings per share, a key metric used by Immelt to measure the performance of GE’s industrial holdings, increased by 14 percent.

Immelt also said that margins continued to expand during the quarter - with operating profit margins rising 90 basis points - and that six out of GE’s seven industrial businesses grew their margins.

“GE performed well in the first quarter, in an environment that remains volatile but with continued growth opportunities in infrastructure,” Immelt said. “This was an important quarter for GE. We delivered good first-quarter results in our industrial businesses.”

The best industrial performers included GE’s Aviation unit (profit up 18 percent and orders up 36 percent), Transportation (profit up 11 percent and deliveries up 22 percent), and Energy Management. Despite a challenging environment caused by a slump oil prices, GE’s oil and gas division also reported an organic 11 percent increase in profit.

Immelt highlighted a recent $850 million deal with Eni Ghana to supply machinery, technology and workers for the country’s Three Points Block offshore oil field.

“Our industrial businesses are performing well and we will continue to invest in our competitive advantages built on the GE Store,” Immelt said, referring to GE’s ability to share technology and know-how between its businesses. “We will continue to boost margins and returns. This is the plan for the future of GE as a fast-growth, high-tech industrial company.”

Above: GE Transportation’s new Tier 4 locomotive is the first freight train engine that meets the U.S. government’s strict Tier 4 emission standards. The locomotive’s design will cut particulate matter (PM) emissions by 70 percent and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions by 76 percent, compared to GE’s current Tier 3 machines. GE has alredy received 1,355 orders for the locomotives. Images credit: Vincent Laforet

Last week, Immelt announced GE would sell most of its GE Capital assets by 2018, a move that would reshape the company and further the role of its industrial businesses as the principal source of GE’s earnings.Immelt said he wanted to “profoundly change the company” and “lead the next generation of industrial progress.” According to this plan, by 2018, GE’s industrial businesses will generate at least 90 percent of GE’s operating earnings, up from 58 percent last year.

By GE Reports staff

There are more than over 2,600 American children born every year with cleft palate and other head and face conditions such as the Treacher Collins syndrome, which can result in an unusually small jaw that makes it difficult to breathe.

The afflictions put parents through an emotional wringer, but doctors are refining a type of head surgery called craniofacial reconstruction to fix and reshape the skull. The surgery is tricky, though, since doctors must first precisely map the skull and account for the child’s future growth.

Top image: It took the Revolution CT scanner just one second to acquire this super-fast, low-dose head image of a 17-year-old patient. Image credit: Dr. J-L Sablayrolles, Centre Cardiologique du Nord, Saint-Denis, France Above: Arteries forming the circle of Willis inside the head of a 15-year-old patient. Image credit: Primary Children’s Hospital, Intermountain Healthcare

Last year, however, some physicians started using a superfast CT scanner made by GE that allows them to analyze the bone structure in great detail. Images acquired by the machine can help clinicians improve the surgery planning process.

“Kids don’t want to stay still and before we got the machine, we had to sedate them to get the right image quality,” says Ron Bursett, medical imaging CT supervisor at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. “But now, we scan the patient in under a second, often without sedation and with the same image clarity.”

A GIF of the circle of Willis. Image credit: West Kendall Baptist Hospital

The CT scanner, called Revolution* CT, uses a combination of high-speed, low-radiation dose capabilities and motion-correction technology to achieve high-resolution images. Until now, this mix has been difficult to achieve. The scanner allows doctors to reduce radiation and still obtain detailed images of blood vessels, soft tissue, organs and bones.

This low-dose image of the circle of Willis, which supplies blodd to the brain, took 2 seconds to acquire. Image credit: Dr. J-L Sablayrolles, Centre Cardiologique du Nord, Saint-Denis, France

The scanner was first available for sale in the U.S. in April 2014, and since then 127 hospitals and medical facilities in the U.S., Europe, China and elsewhere placed an order. It has since driven a 31 percent jump in orders in GE’s high-end CT business.

An image of a mechanical mitral valve made from metal and placed inside the heart. Image credit: Dr. J-L Sablayrolles, Centre Cardiologique du Nord, Saint-Denis, France

Primary Children’s Hospital received their machine last fall and it’s since become the go-to scanner “for everything from head bumps to severe trauma,” Bursett says.

He says that the machine is so fast that it can image the entire heart of a child in less than a second, even with extremely high heart rates. “Our cardiologists and radiologists looked at the first cardiac studies performed on the GE Healthcare Revolution scanner and were blown away by the image quality,” Bursett says.

He says the machine has allowed the team to reduce radiation dose “up to 82 percent” and retain picture quality with the use of GE’s next-generation technology called “adaptive statistical iterative image reconstruction”. Basically, the system listens for noise in the image signal, identifies its cause and removes it.

A urogram. Image credit: Dr. Cury, West Kendall Baptist Hospital

But there’s more to the machine than the latest technology. Bursett says that while doctors like the machine’s technological features, his young patients are captivated by its design. That’s because GE industrial designer Doug Dietz decked out the scanner and the room to look like a pirate ship (see below).

“Some of our patients have never had a medical imaging procedure, let alone been in a hospital,“ Bursett says. “When scanning a patient using a typical scanner, they associate the scan with having a painful or long procedure. The patients tend to start feeling anxious and stressed. This helps them stay occupied while we perform the exam.”

Image credit: Primary Children’s Hospital, Intermountain Healthcare

* Revolution is a trademark of General Electric Company.

By Ki Mae Heussner

For every showing of “A Streetcar Named Desire” in a big city, there’s a street packed with traffic on the way to the theater. Let’s face it, large urban centers may have culture and opportunity on their side, but they come with irksome baggage like congestion, air pollution and the lack of parking.

That baggage is getting heavier. Although half of the world’s population already lives in cities, the U.N. estimates that the number will spill over the 50 percent mark and hit 5 billion by 2030.

The solutions to their growing pains will be complex. But one easy fix is already standing on every corner: the lamppost.

New “intelligent” LED streetlights combined with sensors generating oodles of data and cloud analytics could soon start delivering genuine street smarts and savings.

In February, for example, the City of San Diego in California started working with GE Lighting and outfitting their street lights with energy efficient LEDs. In the future, they can be combined with a suite of weather, video, traffic and other sensors. GE has now expanded the program to Jacksonville, Fla.

The sensors will transmit the gathered data to the server farms where it can be sliced, diced and sorted. The resulting insights could power a range of apps designed to unclog streets, optimize EMT and fire response, locate empty parking spots, and save electricity in the bargain.

“It used to be about generating wattage [and increasing] visibility, but today’s product has the potential to be much more,” Bill Ruh, GE vice president and global technology director told TechCrunch. “[The light pole] has power and adding sensors, you can now do things with these lights everywhere.”

The lowest hanging fruit is reducing the use of electricity by dimming and even turning off lights when there is nobody around, and automatically reporting and repairing broken fixtures. “San Diego has proven that intelligent infrastructure saves energy and taxpayer dollars,” said San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer. We believe that this collaboration will help us go further in creating truly intelligent infrastructure that helps us improve services to the public.”

That’s why the city rolled out LightGrid last year, a wireless controls technology developed by GE that automatically adjusts the brightness of some 3,000 streetlights and allows it to better manage and maintain the fixtures. GE estimates that the technology will save the city a quarter of million dollars annually. “Cities need a system that gives them a real-time view and we believe GE’s smart lights with sensors give them a pulse of how their city is performing,” says Rick Freeman, a general manager for intelligent devices at GE Lighting.

Freeman said, the projects in San Diego and Jacksonville will now focus on collecting and analyzing data, and feeding it to Predix, a software platform that GE developed for creating industry-specific apps that handle big data and predictive analytics in the cloud. “The real power of the program, he added, will emerge over time,” he says.

The City could open the data and insights to researchers, but also to start up and app developers. Their solutions could start cracking urban problems like avoiding traffic bottlenecks and getting to the theater on time, spotting empty parking places, and identifying traffic obstructions – like illegally parked cars – that could pose safety hazard.

Freeman hopes that the information is “going to unlock local epiphanies. It’s going to be a playground for citizens and organizations to provide value on top of this data.”

Says Freeman: “These street lights are ‘bright’ enough to help cities solve tougher problems than just lighting.”

By GE Reports staff

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo fashioned David from marble cut out of the mountains towering over the Tuscan town of Carrara. Today, however, the area’s craftsmen are in the business of making Goliaths.

Adjacent to Carrara are the towns Avenza and Massa, the home of two huge plants and testing fields where GE’s Oil & Gas business builds some of the world’s largest industrial equipment, including five gas turbine generators for the Chevron-operated Gorgon Project, one of the world’s largest natural gas developments located off the coast of Western Australia.

The first module just started generating electricity on Australia’s Barrow Island, as the project moves ever closer to producing gas.

Top image: The first power module arrives on Barrow Island in Western Australia. Above: The module in the Marina di Carrara in Tuscany, with the area’s marble mountains in the background. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

The Gorgon Project is developing the Gorgon and Jansz-Io gas fields, located between 130 and 220 kilometers (80 to more than 130 miles) off the northwest coast of Western Australia.

Power from the GE modules will drive the compressors and refrigeration units on Barrow Island that will liquefy natural gas coming from the sea floor. Chevron will then send the liquefied gas (LNG) via a 2.1-kilometer-long (1.3 miles) loading jetty to a port, so that it can be pumped into supertankers and shipped around the world. The domestic gas will be piped to the Western Australian mainland.

The five GE modules on Barrow Island (upper right). The Gorgon project is operated by an Australian subsidiary of Chevron. The project is a joint venture of the Australian subsidiaries of Chevron (47.3 percent), ExxonMobil (25 percent), Shell (25 percent), Osaka Gas (1.25 percent), Tokyo Gas (1 percent) and Chubu Electric Power (0.417 percent). Image credit: Chevron

Each of the modules weighs as much as four double-decker Airbus jets. GE started shipping them from Italy to their new home more than 12,000 miles away three years ago.

GE Oil & Gas says that building complex industrial installations like Legos from ready-made modules helps energy companies reduce capital costs, improve reliability, speed up start-up time, and minimize their footprint at the construction site.

“At one time, finding oil and gas in some parts of the world was no more difficult than simply digging a hole,” says Davide Iannucci, a general manager for turbomachinery solutions at GE Oil & Gas. “But today, the largest and most attractive prospects tend to be in locations that are remote, have extreme climates, are in environmentally sensitive areas, or have all three of them combined.”

The loading jetty. Image credit: Chevron

Barrow Island, for example, is classified as a “Class A” nature reserve with 378 kinds of native plants, 13 types of mammals and 43 reptiles. As a result, GE workers in Italy had to adhere to a strict quarantine management plan to comply with Gorgon Project and Australian Quarantine requirements while building the modules.

To prevent soil, plant and wildlife contamination, workers had to walk through pressurized air cabins to clean their clothes every time they entered the construction lot. An automatic system washed the soles of their shoes. No food or drink with the exception of bottled water was allowed inside.

Some 3,700 people came to see the first power module in the Marina di Carrara port before it pushed off for Australia. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

The beating heart of each module, which takes about a year to complete, is a massive Frame 9 gas turbine - made at a GE plant in Belfort, France. In total, the five gas turbine generators will have a combined site rating of 584 megawatts of electricity to support Gorgon’s LNG plant.

Workers in Avenza applied six miles of structural welding to assemble the steel trusses that support each module and hold the turbine in place, and also attached 12 miles of electric cable.

Building the massive, 2,300-ton modules was not the only challenge. When they were finished, the company had to move them through Avenza’s streets to port, and load them onto a ship.

It took the first module 4.5 hours to cover the 500-yard distance between the GE plant and the Marina di Carrara port. The goliath rolled, like a centipede, on 578 computerized wheels attached to four orange self-propelled transporters (see above). At one tight point, the module slid so close past a residential complex that a quarter would have gotten stuck between the structures, GE says.

The modules had to cover 12,400 miles between Italy and Barrow Island. Image credit: GE Oil & Gas

GE also had to triple the size of the Avenza plant to more 140,000 square meters (a quarter of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.), to accommodate the structures.

“We are in the midst of an exciting period for the Australian LNG industry, developing, commissioning and starting-up major projects across the country,” said Mary Hackett, the GE Oil & Gas regional director for Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. “Our technology is pivotal in all these projects and to helping Australia develop into a world class, and possibly the biggest, LNG exporter.”

It looks like this goliath is a winner.

By Jon Blauvelt and Ellen Zeidler

Last month, Pope Francis delivered his third Easter Sunday Mass to throngs of pilgrims spilling below his balcony across St. Peter’s Square. The square and the broad Via della Conciliazone leading to the Vatican can hold some 250,000 people, but his seasonal Urbi et Orbi address and blessing (meaning in Latin to the city – Rome - and to the world) reached a much bigger audience thanks to Vatican Radio.

The station, established in 1931, is the Holy See’s official radio service and “the voice of the Pope and the Church in dialogue with the world.” Its programming covering the Pope and official Vatican business reaches all continents except Antarctica. GE technology has been helping to keep it on the air.

Like any broadcaster, Vatican Radio needs secure, stable and even flow of electricity. To meet the station’s rising power demands, the Vatican plugged in GE’s “Uninterruptible Power Supply” (UPS) system, which can provide reliable back-up power during a brief outage.

Top and above: The broadcast tower and center of Vatican Radio. Image credit: Vatican Radio

“With the world eager to hear each and every word of the Pope, we couldn’t afford any interruptions in our broadcast,” says Sandro Piervenanzi, technical director of Vatican Radio. “GE’s UPS systems provided us with stable, filtered power to support critical technical operations.”

Some would say that the Vatican isn’t the only hallowed ground with a GE UPS system. GE technicians installed the technology at several soccer arenas in Brazil for the 2014 world soccer tournament.

Other places using it include data centers that serve airline systems and 911 call response centers, telecommunications systems, hospitals and even small businesses.

By GE Reports staff

In 1997, Cathy Hutchinson suffered a brainstem stroke that left her paralyzed from the neck down. But in 2011, she was able to pick up a bottle of coffee, bring it to her mouth and drink from it again.

Hutchinson, who was 58 at the time, didn’t regain control over her hands. She did it by moving a robotic arm with her thoughts.

Hutchinson controlled the robot with a technology called brain-computer interface, which uses tiny electrodes implanted in the regions of the brain that control hand and arm movements. The 96 microscopic electrodes listened to signals produced by Hutchison’s neurons, fed them to a computer for analysis and translated them into motion, as reported in the journal Nature.

Top: In 2011, Cathy Hutchinson her first sip of coffee on her own in 15 years. She brought the coffee to her lips by controlling a robotic arm with her thoughts. Above: A tiny brain implant was “reading” Hutchinson’s thoughts. GIF credits: Brown University

The technology was developed by the cross-disciplinary BrainGate team. “We’ve moved significantly closer to returning everyday functions, like serving yourself a sip of coffee, usually performed effortlessly by the arm and hand, for people who are unable to move their own limbs,” said Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, who leads  BrainGate with his collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Stanford University, and Case Western Reserve University. “This work is a critical step toward realizing the long-term goal of creating a neurotechnology that will restore movement, control and independence to people with paralysis or limb loss.”

A prototype of a GE brain probe. Image credit: GE Global Research

Donoghue’s team isn’t alone exploring the barrier between the brain and machines. “We build microelectronic brain implants that are specifically designed for nerve stimulation and recording,” says electrical engineer Craig Galligan, who designs neural implants like the inside Hutchinson’s head at GE Global Research in New York. “We want to have the least invasive process in implanting a neural probe, and we also want to target a specific area. Part of the game is knowing exactly what neurons need to be targeted and only stimulate that area.”

A human neuron. GIF credit: Invention Factory

Galligan and his team are now trying to understand how the brain-computer interface will evolve over the next decade. “Early on, it became clear from speaking with top neurosurgeons that the structural dimensions of the probe could have a large impact on the success of an implant,” Galligan wrote in his blog. “Narrower probes appeared to cause less tissue damage and remained functional for longer durations of implantation.”

Since scientists at the GE lab work on any number of things - from new materials for jet engines to chemical sensors based on butterfly wings, and high-resolution medical scanners - Galligan reached out across the hallway to colleagues working on a technology called the MEMS Microswitch to improve on his brain probes. (GE CEO Jeff Immelt calls this idea cross-pollination the GE Store.)

A testing device in Jeff Ashe’s lab. Image credit: GE Global Research

The MEMs, or “micro-electro-mechanical-systems,” can be thinner than a human hair, but they also allow engineers to manage everything from battery life to medical devices and aviation systems. With the MEMs team’s help, Galligan and his colleagues were able to build and test in his lab a probe that was 2 millimeters long and 30 microns wide – less than the diameter of a human hair.

They constructed the probe from a proprietary gold alloy, which was then covered with a 4-micron parylene dielectric coating, basically a type of electrical insulation. They ablated the parylene from the tip of the probe with a UV laser to make sure that it would electrically connect only with the right brain regions. “These efforts are part of the many activities necessary before the probes are evaluated further through clinical research,” Galligan says.

Galligan says that pre-clinical trials have been encouraging. “We observed an excellent signal-to-noise ratio, which allowed for clear measurement of neural spike waveforms,” he says. He also said “the signal recording results were comparable with previously tested neural probes of larger width. These wider probes cause more tissue disruption, and thus may not remain effective for as long as our narrower prototypes.”

The team used the results to apply for an NIH grant to continue the pre-clinical work, “with our eventual longer-term goal being testing and use in humans,” Galligan says.

BrainGate’s John Donoghue. Image credit: Brown University

Galligan’s colleague Jeff Ashe has been working with Donoghue’s BrainGate team to better understand the electrical signals generated by the brain’s neurons. “We really want to know what’s happening down on the cellular level,” Ashe says. “Our sensor designs will be tiny, and they will be able to record the electrical signals coming from the individual neurons,” Ashe says. “Being able to record and separate the signals from the individual neurons, we can then interpret the information the neurons are creating and the functions their circuits should be producing.”

One day, these implants could also help treat brain disease. Says Ashe: “We are looking at tools that actually can listen to the brain cells, understand their language, and speak back to the brain.” Ashe says. “The Brain can communicate to devices, and devices will communicate to the brain.”

By Greg Petsche

Like an SUV towing a trailer in winter, locomotives can lose their grip on slick rails if they’re pulling too much behind them. Since the weather in mountainous areas can change quickly, railroads play it safe and usually only run trains long enough to pull though all weather conditions.

But shorter trains can get expensive. A single rail car can fit enough grain to bake 258,000 loaves of bread, according to the Association of American Railroads. That’s why GE locomotive engineers developed a software-guided supersonic air blower.

Top and above: A supersonic air nozzle blasts away snow, ice and grit, and keeps the rail clean. Image credit: GE Transportation

Take the hilly Ardennes Forest that separates Belgium from Germany. During World War II, heavy snow in the dense woods snared the Allied forces advancing on Berlin during the Battle of the Bulge. That battle now lives on in history books, but the area’s fickle weather still causes trouble. “Slick rails are a constant challenge for trains running on Route 42 that starts in Antwerp, Belgium, and heads southeast down to Luxembourg,” says Tom Cuthbert, engineering team leader for GE PowerHaul locomotives. “The route passes directly through the Ardennes where rain at the bottom quickly turns to snow at the top.”

The problem is so severe that most operators today are not pulling heavy freight trains down the hilly route, Cuthbert says. They take a longer, flatter and more expensive route around the mountain range.

GE’s PowerHaul is one of the few diesel locomotives that can handle the route. But it requires a certain “stickiness” of its wheel, or “48 percent adhesion,” in technical terms. “This is difficult to get reliably, due to track and weather conditions,” Cuthbert says.

Heavy Haul Power International, a European locomotives operator using the PowerHaul, recently invited GE engineers to help them push back against nature and create dry, clean rail conditions even in the midst of heavy snowfall and rain.

Above and below: GE has equipped more than 300 locomotives with the technology for customers like HHPI, BNSF and CSX. Image credit: GE Transportation

The GE team flew into Belgium with a software-guided high-tech air blower called Advanced Rail Cleaner (ARC). The system directs high-pressure air moving at supersonic speeds in front of the lead axle of the locomotive, blasting away contaminants and moisture.

The technology, developed by a crack team of GE engineers experimenting with high-speed rail scrubbers, had earned an outsize reputation following early test runs. It had consistently increased the tonnage hauled - the equivalent of pulling four extra jumbo jets - prevented stalls, increased velocity, and improved the lead locomotive’s traction by up to 30 percent.

But ARC had never before been tested in an environment like the route through the Ardennes, and HHPI’s ambitious goal was to get the number of cars hauled in wet rail conditions through the hills from 23 to 30.

The team embarked on two days of test runs on tracks slick with a slurry of rainwater, snow, grease, and rust, and the ARC didn’t slip up. “We had the worst rail conditions you can imagine, but when ARC cut in the locomotive held its own superbly and we exceeded our haulage expectations,” says Richard Painter, HHPI’s managing director.

GE Transportation’s Matt Malone and Jennifer Coyne. Image credit: GE Transportation

 Cuthbert says that “ARC reliably maximized the PowerHaul’s adhesion to the rail and allowed HHPI to do something nobody else could – pull a 2,700-metric-ton freight train through the Ardennes Mountains in the rain and snow!”

In the five years since it started working on ARC, GE has installed the technology on more than 300 locomotives - a long journey considering the first prototype resembled a glorified sandblaster strapped to the front of the locomotive (see above), says Jennifer Coyne, a GE engineer who worked on the technology.

The latest version aims the air at the precise spot where the wheel meets the rail. The team has optimized it for performance in high degree curves and tough environments, and added software that detects when the locomotive is slipping, and automatically activates ARC to clean the rail.

Says Coyne: “ARC will be a game-changer in the rail industry.”

ARC is not the first time a railroad has used GE technology to clean the rails. In the 1960s, rail operators like New York Central and other have used GE jet engines mounted on a caboose to blast away snow and sand from tracks. Image credit: Donald C. Wetzel.

By GE Reports staff

There are millions of Americans who battle depression every year and many of them fail to respond to pills and other standard treatments or suffer from side effects. “This group of patients often lives in agony, but we thought there must be another way to treat depression,” says Dr. Mark Demitrack, chief medical officer of Neuronetics. “What if you could stimulate the brain from the outside, without drugs, and make it heal?”

The team at Neuronetics pursued a non-invasive technology called “transcranial magnetic stimulation,” or TMS, which uses a small but powerful magnet to deliver electromagnetic energy to the brain tissue through the skull. The U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved its NeuroStar TMS Therapy in 2008, and the company has since become the leader in the field.

On Monday, Neuronetics received $34 million in new investment from GE Ventures and its existing investors. The money will help the company expand the availability of treatment and support more research, including new applications focused on young patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD).

TMS sends targeted magnetic pulses produced by an electromagnetic field - similar to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) - into the left prefrontal cortex of the brain. The energy induces the neurons in the brain to fire, release neurotransmitters like dopamine and activate deeper regions in the brain. Neuronetics says the resulting increase in normally occurring neurotransmitters as well as an increase in blood flow and glucose metabolism in the activated regions “is thought to result in improved mood.”

According to the company’s website, one in two patients responded to the therapy and a third of them achieved complete remission of symptoms. The results were based on seven studies involving 800 patients. The treatment typically lasts four to six weeks, with five 40-minute sessions per week. Medical insurance covers the procedure for some 200 million Americans, Neuronetics says.

“The investment is a good fit for GE,” says Leslie Bottorff, managing director for healthcare investing at GE Ventures. “GE scientists and engineers are heavily involved in brain science through research and innovation challenges with partners like the NFL, developing advanced tools to help patients with neurologic conditions. This non-invasive therapy is a nice complement with those efforts.”

This is not the first time that GE Ventures is backing a non-invasive brain technology. In 2013, it invested in the Israeli company HeadSense, which developed a set of disposable ear buds that allow doctors to monitor intracranial pressure without drilling holes in the skull. GE Ventures also invested in Ornim, a company that non-invasively monitors cerebral blood flow and delivery in the brain.

GE’s Healthcare business alone plans to invest $500 million in neurological disorder research between 2010 and 2020. Learn more about what’s next in the brain and listen to GE’s latest brain health podcast.

Image and GIF credits: Neuronetics

By GE Reports staff

There is no lack of water in Stockholm, which spreads over an archipelago of 14 islands and whose oldest quarter used to be called quite literally “The Town Between the Bridges.”

Yet today, the most exciting water action in the Swedish capital takes place in huge granite tunnels deep under its streets and waterways. The city’s water company, Stockholm Vatten, is upgrading its massive Henriksdal plant that treats two thirds of the capital’s wastewater. To do so, it’s bringing in high-tech bioreactors with undulating membranes that emulate seaweed. Designed by GE, they efficiently filter out everything from gasoline, to bleach and human waste.

When finished, the plant will become the world’s largest water treatment facility with such “membrane bioreactors” (MBRs), capable of processing almost 280 million gallons of dirty water per day. The plant will release the clean water back into the Baltic Sea.

Top: A granite water tunnel under Stockholm. Image credit: Stockholm Vatten Above: A ZeeWeed cassette from GE’s LEAPmbr bioreactor. Image credit: GE Power & Water

The 11 miles of tunnels blasted from Stockholm’s granite bedrock make this project particularly challenging. This rocky straitjacket made any capacity expansion an extremely difficult proposition.

But the city couldn’t wait. Stockholm has one of Europe’s fastest growing populations and Sweden is bound by strict environmental requirements imposed by the Baltic Sea Action Plant and the E.U. Water Directive designed to fight water pollution.

Until now, Stockholm Vatten has used a number of different mechanical, chemical and biological methods to clean the water. It takes about a day for the effluent to pass through the process.

But the city needed something better and GE’s LEAPmbr ultrafiltrationtechnology emerged as the right fit. The reactor comes with unique ZeeWeed 500 filtering membranes coated with a special synthetic resin. The design allows them to undulate and sway much like seaweed.

The membranes are riddled with tiny holes just 40 nanometers wide that filter out bacteria, sediment, and unwanted nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen.

But that’s not the only benefit. The technology is also cheaper to operate and needs a third less power than conventional MBR. Its flexible design allows engineers to fit it within a smaller space – this comes handy when you’re working inside a granite cave.

Gösta Lindh, managing director of Stockholm Vatten, says that the technology “will help us meet our long-term needs for increased wastewater treatment capacity and will help us do so in a more energy-efficient and cost-effective manner.“

Stockholm won’t be the only place with ZeeWeed. The technology is already helping to protect Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a volcanic lake in New Zealand, among many other places around the world.

By GE Reports staff

From Thomas Edison to former President Ronald Reagan and novelist Kurt Vonnegut, GE has employed a number of luminaries over the course of its 123-year history. One famous last name that’s been missing from this list is Spielberg.

In the late 1950s, Arnold Spielberg, the father of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, helped revolutionize computing when he designed the GE-225 mainframe computer. The machine allowed a team of Dartmouth University students and researchers to develop the BASIC programing language, an easy-to-use coding tool that quickly spread and ushered in the era of personal computers. (Young Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs all used the language when they started building their digital empires.)

“I remember visiting the plant when dad was working on the GE-225,” Steven Spielberg told GE Reports. “I walked through rooms that were so bright, I recall it hurting my eyes. Dad explained how his computer was expected to perform, but the language of computer science in those days was like Greek to me. It all seemed very exciting, but it was very much out of my reach, until the 1980s, when I realized what pioneers like my dad had created were now the things I could not live without.”

The Dartmouth team ran BASIC, or Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, on the GE-225 for the first time a half-century ago, on May 1, 1964.

The GE-225 at a GE factory in Schenectady, N.Y.

Arnold Spielberg, who is now 98, has been fascinated with electronics from an early age. “[It] was sort of a way of life for me, because I started playing around with radios when I was about eight or nine years old,” he told Anne Frantilla, a historian from the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota.

During World War II, he served as the communications chief of a U.S. bomb squadron in India and later started making early vacuum tube computers at RCA Corp. GE engineer Homer R. “Barney” Oldfield hired Spielberg to set up GE’s Industrial Computer Department in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1957.

The department’s name, however, was a ruse. Unlike Oldfield, Ralph Cordiner, then GE chairman and CEO, didn’t want to make business computers. “Every time a plan was sent to him that mentioned going into business computers, he would write ‘No’ across it and send it back,” Arnold Spielberg told Frantilla. Cordiner apparently believed that an industrial company should make products for industry.

Still, Oldfield forged ahead without Cordiner’s blessing. Spielberg and his former RCA colleague Charles Posner designed the GE-225 in 1959. It was a 20-bit computer that filled an entire room and contained 1,000 circuit boards, 10,000 transistors and 20,000 diodes. It stored data on disks, magnetic tapes, punch cards and paper tapes. It also allowed operators sitting at up to 11 external terminals to access the memory independently. The possibility of this embryonic form of personal computing led the Dartmouth team to develop BASIC.

When Cordiner found out what the team was doing, it was too late. They already had Bank of America as a customer. “[He] came out to attend the dedication ceremonies and promptly fired Barney Oldfield right after the ceremony for violating his rules,” Arnold Spielberg told Frantilla. “He gave the company 18 months to get out of the business.”

It took longer than that. The GE-225, which cost $250,000, was a hit and the marketing team described early orders as a “landslide.” The business sold dozens of them to customers and also to other GE units “The GE-225 can add 30,000 six-digit numbers in one second and can calculate the ages of every man, woman and child in Schenectady in 5 seconds,” wrote the Schenectady Works News, a GE newspaper. One machine working at the First Union National Bank in North Carolina predicted the results of the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater presidential race within 5 percentage points, reported the GE Monogram magazine. The Cleveland Browns football team used a GE-225 to manage season ticket sales. “Who knows,” quipped the Browns’ president Art Modell in 1966, “there might come a time when computers will help call the next play.”

Arnold Spielberg left GE in 1963, the same year Dartmouth’s “BASIC team” traveled to Arizona to learn how to program the equipment. GE sold the computer division to Honeywell in 1970. The IEEE Computer Society recognized Spielberg as a computer pioneer in 2006 for “contribution to real-time data acquisition and recording that significantly contributed to the definition of modern feedback and control processes.”

GE’s current Chairman and CEO - and Dartmouth graduate - Jeff Immelt has, in a sense, finally carried out Cordiner’s vision of industrial computing. The company is now developing software and cloud analytics for the Industrial Internet, monitoring and making more efficient everything from oil rigs to power plants and jet engines.

By GE Reports staff

GE will connect its intelligent Align LED light bulbs, which adjust their light waves to help promote the body’s natural sleep cycle, with Apple’s HomeKit platform, which allows users to control connected home devices from their phones.

The history of lighting is also the history of GE. In the 1870s, Thomas Edison invented the first practical light bulb. Three years ago, GE engineers opened a 100-year-old time capsule with an Edison-era light bulb inside. When they turned it on, it still worked (see video). Image credit: GE Lighting. 

The combination of GE’s proprietary Align technology and HomeKit will give consumers the ability to synch lighting with their circadian rhythms. They will be able to control the bulbs from their mobile devices and with voice commands via Siri.

“It’s going to change the way we live,” says John Strainic, GE Lighting’s general manager for North America. “Some bands in the light spectrum keep you up and others help you unwind before you go to bed. By tailoring the spectrum of blue light output, you can enhance your body’s sleep and awake cycles. It’s a new science.”

In 1963, GE engineer Nick Holonyak built the first practical LED (see video). Image credit: GE Lighting

Align is one of the latest iterations of the LED – or light-emitting diode – which GE engineer Nick Holonyak first developed in 1963. It works by stacking LEDs of different colors to make a light source that can increase or lower the concentration of blue light.

The bluer wavelengths help people wake up since they suppress the body’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin. In the evening, more amber tones reminiscent of candlelight or campfires help the body relax. “I use it at home and it helps me slow down from going 90 miles-per-hour and take me to a place where I can read,” says Tom Boyle, chief innovation manager at GE Lighting.

Edison’s light bulb changed the way we live. In the late 1800s, it inspired public “torchlight parades” through the streets of New York. Image credit: GE

Boyle says that his team is constantly looking for new ways to improve on the LED. The latest specimens in his lab include a special kind of material called potassium fluorosilicate (PFS) that emits light near the ideal combination of brightness and appearance. “We are always looking for things that give us more knobs to turn and come up with the perfect light,” Boyle says.

Beth Comstock, GE’s chief marketing officer and CEO of GE Lighting announced the partnership with Apple at the LightFair trade show today. The first HomeKit-enabled Align LED light will ship later this year.

By GE Reports staff

Not everything Thomas Edison touched became raging success. His “monster doll” turned out to be an outright dud.

In 1877, Edison made the first recording device that could play back sound, and from there it was just a short leap of imagination to the “talking doll.” The doll, which held inside its tin body a miniature phonograph, gave owners the option to listen to popular nursery rhymes. Unfortunately, the recordings also produced copious amounts of spooky crackling and hissing sounds. Even Edison called the dolls “little monsters.”

“To operate the doll you had to turn the crank by hand, turning at the perfect pace to keep the right count,” said Robin Rolfs, a collector of Edison dolls and co-author of “Phonograph Dolls & Toys.” Credit: Courtesy of Robin and Joan Rolfs.

Last year, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, recovered a 123-year-old recording of an unidentified woman reciting “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”. It was recorded on a foil cylinder tucked inside a doll, and has not been heard since Edison’s lifetime (listen below).

Edison’s doll factory. Credit: Courtesy of Robin and Joan Rolfs

The doll was reportedly a “dismal failure,” but the setback did not stop Edison from pursuing other spooky ideas. In 1920 he announced that he had been working on the “spirit phone.” In theory, the machine would allow callers to speak with dead people.

The news generated a lot of media attention, but he spirit phone never materialized. (The project may have been Edison’s prank on credulous reporters.)

Edison died a few years later, but it seems his playful spirit took permanent residence inside GE labs. During World War II, GE scientist James Wright and his team were working on a new kind of silicon rubber for the military when someone accidentally mislabeled a chemical bottle in their lab. The mistake resulted in a chemical reaction that led to a gooey compound that became known as Silly Putty, one of the most popular toys in history.

Unlike the monster doll, Silly Putty was a keeper. In 2001 it entered the National Toy Hall of Fame.

James Wright and his team at GE were working on a new kind of silicon rubber for the military when someone accidentally mislabeled a chemical bottle in their lab. The mistake resulted in a chemical reaction that led to a gooey compound that became known as Silly Putty.

By GE Reports staff

A seaborne locomotive sounds like crazy idea, but engineer Andy McKeran, who designs heavy-duty offshore equipment at GE, might give it another look. “One of the big benefits of working here is that someone in some other part of the company may have already solved your problem,” he says. “We call it the GE store, except that you don’t have to buy the solution, you get it free.”

McKeran and his team build technology for drill ships, blowout preventers (BOPs), risers and other machines battered by the seas as far as 100 miles from the coast for months at a time. When something goes wrong, it might take a while to fix it.

Outages to the “money line” that’s tapping subsea oil reservoirs, for example, can quickly add up to $700,000 per day. “A single failure in the chain of equipment can cause an unpredictable and unproductive event,” says McKeran, who is visiting this week’s Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Tex. “What we need is a ‘God’s view’ of the entire system and and the ability to prevent problems before they strike.” 

That view is called SeaStream. It allows drilling companies to see the vessel and the subsea equipment as a whole, monitor it in real time, record and analyze its history, and search for anomalies. “It could take you up to three weeks to find and fly the right expert to a remote platform to fix something,” McKeran says. “But software and connectivity can actually bring the issue to the experts on shore.”

Traditionally, service crews would replace parts in subsea equipment on a set schedule, even if there was nothing wrong with them.

This approach has worked well, but it’s also expensive. “We wanted to move from prescriptive to predictive maintenance with data and analytics,“ McKeran says. "This way we can get a digital picture of the entire system and detect anomalies.”

That’s where insights from “intelligent” trains and planes come handy. Over the last few years, power plants, airlines, hospitals other businesses around the world have started using big data systems built on GE’s robust Predix software platform. The company’s software engineers developed it specifically for the Industrial Internet, a digital network connecting, collecting and analyzing data from a myriad of sensors already installed in locomotives, jet engines and other intelligent machines.

One such system called Movement Planner, for example, has allowed Norfolk Southern to optimize its 20,000-mile-long rail network, make locomotives go faster, and move more cargo without building new tracks. “A locomotive or a jet engine can be very different from a drill ship, but using software to monitor them and make them perform better is actually quite similar,” McKeran says.

GE built SeaStream to be "manufacturer-agnostinc” - it can work with machines of any make. “Today, our domain expertise covers the entire vessel, from propulsion to drilling to cybersecurity,” McKeran says. What’s the outcome? McKeran says that the system could help reduce unplanned downtime by 20 percent and third-party costs associated with repairs by a quarter, or in the region of $16 million per vessel per year.

“We can help prevent immediate loss of revenue,” McKeran says. “But we also give customers the ability to predict that their ship is going to be ready and available for the next job.”