Ashley Ringer is not just an early bird, she is a human lark. She gets up at 5.20 a.m., leaves the house less than an hour later and is normally the first person in the office at 6.30 a.m. As a lead engineer in GE Aviation’s Business & General Aviation (B&GA) division in Dayton, Ohio, Ringer needs to start work early. Luckily, the dawn starts were a way of life for Ringer long before she began at GE. “The wind is best at that time of the morning, so the flying is good.”

Ringer would know. She is a fourth-generation pilot from a family that has enough aviation stories for an epic American novel. Last Friday, she rose well before sunrise as usual. But this time, she didn’t drive to her office on the banks of the Great Miami River. She headed for her local airport, the starting point for her annual pilgrimage to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, Wisconsin’s legendary air show.

True to form, Ringer was thinking ahead and drawing up her flight plan to Oshkosh. She planned to arc around the southern shores of Lake Michigan in her trusty two-seater Cessna 140 before heading north toward Lake Winnebago. “Watch the headwind, get high, let it cruise for good fuel efficiency, make a beeline for Chicago, then head straight for Oshkosh.”

Ringer has lost count of the times she has been to Oshkosh — “it’s either eight or nine” — and she has flown in on her own plane on five occasions. But this will be the first time that she has landed at Oshkosh with special cargo: a baby on board. That’s right: Ringer is five months pregnant, and her due date is Nov. 11. And in case you’re wondering, the bump does not present any cockpit issues. “I’m not sticking out that far yet, so I don’t have to turn sideways,” she laughs.

Above: Ringer, inside her Cessna 140, has lost count of the times she has been to Oshkosh. Top: Ringer and her family  in Oshkosh. Images credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

She knows that she is expecting a girl, but Ringer did not find that out in the traditional way. After the all-important ultrasound appointment, Ringer passed the results on to her friend in a sealed envelope and headed to the local airport with her husband. They were there to watch a fly-past with a twist.     

“My friend, who is a pilot, flipped the exhaust and it left a pink trail,” Ringer says. “I was shocked — I thought it was going to be a boy!” So, the key question: Will Ringer’s daughter be the first in a fifth generation of pilots? “She’ll have no choice.”

You could say the same about Ringer, given how steeped her family is in aviation lore. For starters, at least three generations of her family have flown at Oshkosh: Ringer, her father and her grandfather. It might even be four. “I’ve heard that there might be a great-grandfather too, but I need to look into that,” she says.

But there is less doubt about the two grandfathers on her father’s side, who were both flying aces. Her grandpa John flew PBYs, those iconic American seaplanes, in World War II, before he became an engineer. “He designed all kinds of cool gadgets and made stuff, including sensors for the C-130,” she says, referring to the legendary C-130 Hercules, the world’s longest continuously produced military aircraft.

Grandpa Roland, stepdad to Ringer’s father, obtained his license in 1949. He also turned out to be brilliant: He won awards from the Federal Aviation Administration and became a flying instructor. “My dad learned from him,” says Ringer.

With this kind of pedigree, it’s no surprise that Pop ended up an aviator. Ringer’s father now works as an instructor for the Boeing 737 at Southwest Airlines after a long career as a maintenance instructor at United Airlines. However, he began his career as a mechanic and still gives maintenance classes.

“We haven’t even got to my uncles,” jokes the younger Ringer. (One uncle was a superstar Black Hawk pilot; another is currently restoring a Cessna 152.)

Ringer caught the flying bug. She remembers her father lovingly restoring the Cessna 140, the single-engine, light aircraft that has served as her family’s training vehicle for decades. “He rebuilt everything: wings, fabric, instrument panel — I played in it with my brother Shawn when we were kids.”

It is clear that Shawn Ringer, who is 17 months her senior and is now a distinguished pilot with the Air National Guard, has become something of an idol to his sister. “He’s the best damn pilot you will ever meet, but don’t tell him that.” Shawn won every prize going at school and graduated at the top of his class.

But there is also a whiff of healthy sibling rivalry along with the inspiration. Ashley Ringer began flight training at Northwest Regional Airport in Texas at the age of 16 and obtained her private pilot’s license two years later. “I was a little delayed compared to Shawn, but that was only because I took a trip to France,” she laughs. She has now clocked around 250 hours of flying time.

As a child, Ringer also dreamed of being a commercial airline pilot like her dad but changed her mind in her early teens. “I saw United go through a rough time after 9/11,” she says. A career in her family’s other great talent, engineering, began to look more attractive.

She combined her two passions and at Purdue University, Indiana, earning a bachelor’s degree there, as well as a master’s degree in aeronautical and aerospace management. The school is something of a pilot’s paradise. Purdue established the country’s first four-year bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering technology — which has become a seriously competitive program — and also boasts its own airport. The school earned a reputation for being the “Cradle of Astronauts” in the mid-20th century: Both the first and last people to walk on the moon — Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan — are Purdue alumni.

Ringer’s brother Shawn flies C-130 planes. She makes generators for the aircraft. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

After a five-year career at Caterpillar, Ringer moved to GE, where she now oversees the design and manufacture of generators, the airborne power plants that use the plane’s jet engines to produce mile-high electricity. Ringer gives GE Reports a fluent 101 on aircraft generation, explaining how alternators convert mechanical energy to the electrical energy that powers everything from an aircraft’s avionics and essential control systems to the coffee machines and entertainment systems.

She then reels off a list of planes that use generators made at her plant: They include the Boeing 777X, the new wide-body passenger jetwith the sleek, raptorlike wings, and, yes, the C-130. “Shawn now actually flies C-130s,” says Ringer. “He always says that ‘as long as you designed it, I would test fly it!’ ”

Ringer, who has been with GE for four years, is optimistic about the future. “They’re doing a great job of retaining female engineers, such as giving you the time away that you need for maternity leave.” She and her husband are well prepared for their growing family. She recently flew the Cessna 140 over a plot of land where the couple are building a new home. “Right now, it looks like a giant mud pit, but it should be completed in a month.”

In fact, the two-seater plane seems to be a major character in all the key events of Ringer’s life. She remembers her first date with her husband. “I flew us to and from the restaurant, but he paid for dinner.” It also goes without saying that Ringer flew into her own wedding. She will soon be able to share flying duties with her husband, who begins training this year.

Ringer still flies almost every weekend and sometimes manages some hours before work, even if it is just landing practice. She characterizes herself as a methodical, scientific pilot. “I’m very precise with my flying — my dad always said that he knew exactly how I’d carry out every maneuver,” she says. Shawn Ringer, on the other hand, is more of an artist, explains his sister. “You never knew what he was going to do.”

She is happiest on longer cross-country flights that require some planning. Flying after a winter storm one year is a particularly vivid memory. “I looked down and everywhere was covered in snow — it was beautiful.”

Ringer is looking forward to the four-hour trip to Oshkosh and spending a week among fellow flying junkies. “It’s great when all the crowds leave and only the pilots are left — it’s a really friendly atmosphere.”

But her fondest memory of Oshkosh is not actually about flying, but family. “I remember I was up with Dad,” she says. “He reached his arm around me and gave a hug.”

The bulk of the electricity generated in the United States still comes from fossil fuels, but the times are changing. In April this year, the country generated more power from renewable sources than from coal for the first time ever. Amid the excitement over rocketing solar and wind power production, it is easy to forget the quiet, reliable stalwart in the renewables pack: hydropower. The country’s hydropower plants have generated 250-300 terawatt-hours of carbon-free power for the country every year over the last decade.

But the numbers do not tell the whole story, because the country’s hydropower plants are adjusting to a whole new way of working. They are no longer switched on all day and night, churning out baseload power. Instead, hydropower plants are learning to join and depart the grid at the whim of the elements, which places new demands on the facilities in terms of flexibility, reliability and sustainability. The U.S. also has some of the world’s oldest hydropower plants, which means that modernization has become a priority.

One man who relishes the challenge is Pierre Marx, the general manager for GE Renewable Energy’s hydropower business in North America. Marx, who is in Oregon for the Hydrovision International, the U.S.’ largest gathering of hydro professionals, led GE Reports through the new landscape. He also explained why he needs to spend plenty of time thinking about ducks and salmon. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Top image: A massive pumped hydro power plant in Linthal, Switzerland, is using GE generators. Image credit: GE Reports. Above: Image credit: Getty Images.

GE Reports: Why do we need to be talking about hydropower now?

PM: The growth of fast-growing renewables such as wind and solar has changed hydropower from being a baseload generation to a load-following generation. Operators use to start and stop their plants once or twice per month, but they now need to do so twice per day. That is the case in the western states in the U.S., where the increasing penetration of solar and wind in California has turned hydropower facilities in Washington and Oregon into load-following generators.

GER: Load-following? What do you mean by that?

PM: OK, so let’s take California, which has a very high penetration of solar energy in its generation mix, but is also supplied by hydropower plants in Washington and Oregon. The sun rises in the morning and pushes solar power’s share of the mix up to 30%. But at sunset, you suddenly lose all of that power. Those conditions create the state’s famous ‘duck curve’, because the load curve looks like the profile of a duck. Hydropower needs to step up — once in the morning before the sun rises and at then again at sunset — when those solar power slumps occur. Ramping hydropower generation up and down to meet demand puts a huge strain on those assets, which challenges their reliability and flexibility. This challenge arrives against a backdrop of an aging hydropower fleet— the average age of the U.S. fleet is over 60 years — and stricter environmental regulation.

GER: So how could you deal with these duck curves?

PM: Well, hydropower pumped storage facilities are one solution because they can provide a grid with a reserve of energy that it can call on at any time for extra flexibility. But we are also working to improve the management of hydropower assets with digital solutions. For example, we are gathering and analyzing data about every aspect of a hydropower plant which allows us to reduce planned and unplanned outages or predict how that machine is going to operate for example.

GER: Could you give an example of how gathering data helps?

PM: Let’s take the example of unplanned outages. An analysis of mountains of data about pressure, temperature or turbulence might be able to predict an unplanned outage, or tell an operator that they don’t necessarily have to stop their turbines for unneeded maintenance. In both cases, the operator minimizes downtime, winning them several more generation hours that boosts their wholesale power revenues. It’s a game changer.

GER: We hear that GE Renewable Energy has also been working on some other new features?

PM: That’s right. We’re building fish-friendly hydropower turbines that prevent the injury and death of migratory fish caused by either passage through the turbines. That’s in response to U.S. regulation on hydropower plants, which stipulates that 98% of fish must survive the passage through a turbine.

GER: Fish-friendly turbines? How does that work?

PM: Well, when fish pass through run-of-river hydropower plants, they can get buffeted around by the turbine blades. That can stun them, leaving them vulnerable to predators, such as birds. So we are designing special turbine runner blades that reduce the blade strikes on fish that pass through the McNary Dam on the Columbia River on the Oregon-Washington border, where we are carrying out a huge modernization program after being awarded the contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and have received recently the notice to proceed. The runner blades have been designed according to the shape and size of the fish, which in this case, are young salmon. The goal is to significantly boost the fish survival rate at the McNary Dam while ensuring the excellent performance and efficiency of the plant. The McNary project is a significant contract for us — because of the size and length of the contract (14 units over approximately 14 years). It highlights our proven expertise and competitiveness in the hydropower rehabilitation business and our dedication to provide environment-friendly technologies to our customers.

GER: Could you explain the dissolved oxygen problem?

PM: There are also strict rules in the U.S. about minimum dissolved oxygen levels in the water passing through a hydropower plant. Oxygen-rich water ensures a favorable habitat for fish and other aquatic life. But the water that is diverted through a hydropower plant can be hypoxic, or low in oxygen levels. That’s because the deeper you go, the less aeration there is. That deeper water is also the water that travels through the hydro turbines, meaning that there is a risk of oxygen-depleted water being released downstream, and impacting an entire river.

GER: So what’s the solution there?

PM: We are using innovative technology, such as specially shaped interblade profiles that are easy to integrate into the runner blade design. That ensures that more oxygen bubbles into the water. We know that the smaller the bubbles, the better the transfer of oxygen into the water, and that’s what our technology achieves. Cube Hydro is already using that technology in its High Rock facility in North Carolina.

GER: And have you had good results?

PM: Yes. Early results suggest they have boosted both the efficiency of the plant and the oxygen levels of the water. The project is exceeding expectations, injecting significant levels of oxygen with just one of the three turbines using the technology. We’ve already sold the technology to one other customer and we’re getting good feedback from other customers that these initial positive results are encouraging for the Industry. It’s great news for the fish because maintaining a high level of oxygen means good living conditions for all aquatic wildlife. But it also means that our customers can operate plants that are technically efficient and environmentally friendly.

When doctors prescribe drugs for people with chronic diseases, they do so knowing that unwanted side effects on the body can occur. In some cases, it’s a matter of risk versus benefit. “When someone gives you a pill,” says Victoria Cotero, a molecular biologist at GE Research, “not all of it goes to work on your disease.”

But what if you could devise a treatment as effective as a drug but with less risk of collateral damage? That question spawned the field of bioelectronic medicine, which combines neuroscience, molecular biology and bioengineering to tap into the nervous system to treat disease and injury without pharmaceuticals. The goal, in essence, is to mimic the action of drugs by applying some form of energy to the nervous system near affected organs — to the spleen, say, to treat inflammation due to sepsis, or to the liver to lower blood sugar in diabetics.

So far, most of this work has involved exposing nerves to small electrical currents. The current acts on molecules on the lining of nerve cells, called receptors, in the same way that a drug molecule would, starting a beneficial chain reaction in the cell. The results are promising, but the approach requires surgery to implant electrodes, which carries a risk of infection.

Fortunately, electrical current isn’t the only form of energy that does the trick. In the last few years, Cotero, part of GE Research’s bioelectronic medicine team, along with scientists from the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and other GE researchers, have demonstrated that ultrasound may one day provide an alternative to drugs and electrodes. In tests on pre-clinical models, the researchers have used ultrasound to achieve effects similar to drugs on the spleen and the liver, without side effects or surgery. The sound waves exert pressure on the nerve cell receptors, causing them to signal. The team published the research in the journal Nature Communications earlier this year.

GE’s Victoria Cotero and Chris Puleo were part of a team exploring bioelectronic medicine. Their goal is to mimic the action of drugs by applying some form of energy to the nervous system near affected organs. Images credit: GE Research.

Although the work is in the early stages, it suggests that ultrasound is a promising avenue for conditions such as diabetes and sepsis. Because ultrasound has a proven track record of safety — it’s routinely used to check the health of pregnant women and fetuses, for instance — it’s a good candidate for further research.

The GE researchers started doing ultrasound tests on the spleen in 2016. Electrical implants had shown dramatic effects on inflammation on lab rats with sepsis, a condition in which the animal’s reaction to infection causes inflammation throughout the body. The researchers modeled their experiment on this work but with two key differences: They didn’t use implants and, rather than focusing their ultrasound on nerve “trunks” far upstream of the affected organs, they trained their beams on nerves within the organs themselves.

Getting close to the organs yields more dramatic results. That’s because the nerves within organs have more plentiful and accessible receptors — protein molecules that can trigger a beneficial cascade of electrochemical reactions in the organ — than nerves farther upstream. Ultrasound also allows researchers to deliver energy to receptors spread over a wide area, which is common for nerves closer to an organ.

Cotero and her colleagues have also shown in lab rats that hitting nerves near the liver with ultrasound can lower blood glucose levels. The next step is to figure out exactly how the ultrasound works; at some point, it may be appropriate to test its effect on patients. “We have a proof of concept,” Cotero says.

Cotero came to GE in 2010 from SUNY Albany, where she studied how Alzheimer’s disease affects the way the body handles glucose, insulin and other aspects of human metabolism. In the future, with more research and testing, it may be possible to use ultrasound as a treatment option, Cotero says.

“Instead of having to take a bunch of pills, you might not need any drugs,” she says. “Or maybe you take fewer drugs at lower doses, which is easier on the body. You might even be able to administer the ultrasound yourself with a home device. ”

Scientists created a gel that’s absolutely packed with bacteria-killing viruses, engineers designed a super sensitive microphone that can eavesdrop on the whispers of atoms, and researchers developed a test to quickly detect signs of sepsis in the bloodstream. This week’s coolest scientific discoveries are so small that you can’t see or hear them without special help — but their effects may be resounding.

Phages, Heal Thyself

What is it? Researchers at Ontario’s McMaster University created an anti-bacterial gel made of bacteriophages— endlessly abundant, naturally occurring viruses that kill bacteria. The gel is packed so tightly with phages, as they’re known for short, that it can also heal itself when cut into.

Why does it matter? Phages are the most common organisms on the planet, and — as bacteria-killing viruses — hold promise as a way to treat infections otherwise resistant to antibiotics. ”Phages are all around us, including inside our bodies,” said McMaster chemical engineer Zeinab Hosseini-Doust, who led the research. “Phages are bacteria’s natural predators.” The potential applications of a phage gel are plenty: It could be used to coat surgical implants, as a “sterile growth scaffold for human tissue,” or in environmental cleanup. The substance is described further in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

How does it work? According to McMaster, Hosseini-Doust and her lab partners “grew, extracted and packed together so many of the viruses … that they assembled themselves spontaneously into liquid crystals and, with the help of a chemical binder, formed into a gelatin-like substance that can heal itself when cut.” The gel is yellow and resembles Jell-O, and a single milliliter of it contains 300 trillion phages. That’s a lot of bang for your buck.

Top image: Bacteriophages are bacteria-killing viruses. Image credit: Getty Images.

Meet The Fockers

The microphone could lead to “smaller, more efficient quantum computers that operate by manipulating sound rather than light,” according to Stanford. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? The world’s most sensitive microphone, created by engineers at Stanford, can measure sound down to its individual particle, called phonons; it “exploits quantum principles to eavesdrop on the whispers of atoms.”

Why does it matter? The microphone could lead to “smaller, more efficient quantum computers that operate by manipulating sound rather than light,” according to Stanford. “We expect this device to allow new types of quantum sensors, transducers and storage devices for future quantum machines,” said Amir Safavi-Naeini, an assistant professor of applied physics who led the study, which was published in Nature.

How does it work? Just like light can be measured in photons, sound can be broken down into “discrete values” and assigned a “Fock state” depending on the number of phonons it produces — 1 Fock state refers to 1 phonon and so forth, with higher Fock states corresponding to louder volumes. Single phonons are so small as to be nearly immeasurable, though: As graduate student Patricio Arrangoiz-Arriola explained, “One phonon corresponds to an energy 10 trillion trillion times smaller than the energy required to keep a light bulb on for one second.” So the Stanford team devised a quantum microphone — consisting of supercooled nanomechanical resonators, it’s so small that it takes an electron microscope to see it.

Spare Throat

A graphene sheet. Illustration credit. Getty Images.

What is it? A team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing designed an “artificial throat” that could give speech to people who’ve otherwise lost the ability. Made of graphene, it’s thin and skinlike, and sticks to the throat like a temporary tattoo.

Why does it matter? People lose the ability to speak when they sustain throat injuries or get lesions on their vocal cords. Though researchers previously have developed devices that can measure movement on the skin — like pulses or heartbeats — these haven’t been able to convert those movements into sound. Researchers published their findings in ACS Nano.

How does it work? The team deposited graphene onto a film made of water-soluble polyvinyl alcohol film — which, when wetted, adheres temporarily to the skin of the throat. The device attaches to electrodes connected to a band worn on the arm; a computer on the armband, connected to a little amplifier, decodes movements made by the throat (such as “OK” and “No”) and turns them into sound. In the future, people who’ve lost the ability to speak could be trained to “generate signals with their throats that the device would translate into speech.”

Cell-Fulfilling Prophecy

MIT scientists studied embryonic development using an algorithm also used to examine the shape of galaxies. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? To get a better idea of how tissue folds — a key part of embryonic development, allowing cells to develop into organs and other shapes — biologists at MIT took a cue from their colleagues down the hall in the math department: They studied development using an algorithm also used to examine the shape of galaxies.

Why does it matter? The process by which tissue takes shape is called morphogenesis, and one way that tissue morphs — from flat sheets of cells — is by folding. The process is fairly reliable, so much so that previous studies conducted on fruit flies found that even when some embryonic cells are damaged, the sheets still fold into a predictable shape. MIT biologist Adam Martin — the senior author of a new, er, tissue paper in Developmental Cell— said, “This is a process that’s fairly reproducible, and so we wanted to know what makes it so robust.”

How does it work? Martin sought out Jörn Dunkel, a professor of applied physical mathematics “who studies the physics of soft surfaces and flowing matter — for instance, wrinkle formation and patterns of bacterial streaming,” according to MIT. Dunkel suggested using an algorithm that identifies topographical features in a three-dimensional landscape — and that astronomers have used to identify galaxies. Applying the method to embryonic development, Martin, Dunkel and colleagues discovered that “the reproducibility of tissue folding is generated by a network of proteins that connect like fishing net, creating many alternative pathways that tissues can use to fold the right way.” If one cell fails, in other words, the rest are still able to do the job.

Blood Simple

“For an acute disease, such as sepsis, which progresses very rapidly and can be life-threatening, it’s helpful to have a system that rapidly measures these nonabundant biomarkers,” said MIT PhD student Dan Wu. Image credit: Felice Frankel.

What is it? Also at MIT, researchers designed a sensor that can detect signs of sepsis in 25 minutes from less than a finger prick of blood.

Why does it matter? The immune system’s overreaction to signs of infection, sepsis is a serious condition that can lead to septic shock and even death; it kills about 250,000 patients annually in U.S. hospitals. Searching for biomarkers in the blood that might indicate sepsis, doctors have zeroed in on a protein called interleukin-6; blood levels of IL-6 rise hours before other symptoms can develop. Even when the levels are elevated, though, they’re still too low to be detected by traditional means. “For an acute disease, such as sepsis, which progresses very rapidly and can be life-threatening, it’s helpful to have a system that rapidly measures these nonabundant biomarkers,” said PhD student Dan Wu, first author of a paper presented this week at the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference. “You can also frequently monitor the disease as it progresses.”

How does it work? The device relies on microfluidics, explains a release from MIT: “In one microfluidic channel, microbeads laced with antibodies mix with a blood sample to capture the IL-6 biomarker. In another channel, only beads containing the biomarker attach to an electrode. Running voltage through the electrode produces an electrical signal for each biomarker-laced bead, which is then converted into the biomarker concentration level.” The device is also smaller and cheaper than traditional blood assays and is, Wu said, a “very general platform” that could be used to search the blood for biomarkers of other diseases, too.

Here’s a bit of old news: The world wants more renewable power. The tricky work of feeding it into our homes, schools and offices doesn’t often make the headlines — but figuring it out is key to changing the energy mix.

Dense cities surrounded by expensive land are no place to build a wind farm; they work best in windswept seas and on vast, open plains. Likewise, a giant solar installation works best in the remote desert — not the most habitable place. That’s why energy experts are increasingly interested in building electricity superhighways that can ship renewable electrons efficiently across long distances to customers. It’s a difficult and expensive task that will take years and cost tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone.

And distance is just one challenge. Wind and solar power themselves are tough to pin down. Unlike electricity from gas-fired power plants, which can work around the clock, wind and solar aren’t generally available on demand. They depend on environmental factors beyond our control — the fickle breeze, cloud cover and the setting of the sun.

Further complicating matters is the issue of inertia. Although most people haven’t thought about inertia since their last physics class, it’s a key factor that helps keep our lights on. That’s because today electricity comes to sockets in our homes in the form of alternating current, or AC. As the name implies, AC moves along a wire in a sine wave, changing direction — or alternating — 120 times per second between plus and minus in the U.S. (In Europe, it switches 100 times per second.) If the frequency gets out of whack a little, lights can start to flicker, oven clocks may slow down and machines may not work properly. Larger frequency disruptions may cause conventional power plants to disconnect from the grid as a way to prevent damage to their expensive turbines and generators — and lead to blackouts.

The frequency is set by spinning generators inside power plants. When huge generators inside conventional power stations supplied all of our electricity, maintaining this constant frequency was relatively easy. That’s because even if you take your foot off the gas, the inertia of the heavy generator will keep it spinning. But maintaining a constant frequency can be problematic when the wind suddenly stops blowing. Although wind turbines also have inertia, they typically grind to a halt much faster. It’s even worse with solar farms, which have virtually no inertia and stop producing power as soon as the sun disappears.

That’s why grid operators, as well as governments, are increasingly looking at another way to transmit electricity: high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission. Direct current, or DC, is much simpler than AC: It can flow in either direction at a constant plus or minus voltage. DC has been around since the days of Thomas Edison, but it gave ground to AC because, back then, it was hard to transmit efficiently over long distances.

But today, those technological challenges have been largely solved, and modern HVDC links can transmit three times as much power over the same transmission line corridor as AC. A 2018 study commissioned by the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that HVDC lines “have a number of potential benefits including cost effectiveness, lower electricity losses, and the ability to handle overloads and prevent cascading failures. These attributes mean that HVDC lines could, if properly configured, help mitigate some operational issues associated with renewable generation.”

In May, GE Reports visited Stafford, a town in the British Midlands where GE Renewable Energy’s Grid Solutions unit designs, tests and builds some of the most advanced HVDC systems. We sat down with GE Grid Solutions power guru Colin Davidson to talk about the technology. Here’s an edited version of our electrifying conversation.

The world wants more renewable power, but the tricky work of feeding it into our homes, schools and offices doesn’t often make the headlines. Figuring it out, however, is key to changing the energy mix. Top and above images credit: Getty Images.

GE Reports: Thomas Edison was a big fan of DC, but he lost the war of the currents to AC proponents Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse in the 1890s. I thought the case was settled. Why are we still talking about DC?

Colin Davidson: Well, the truth is that DC never completely went away. Most power plants, whether they burn coal to produce electricity or use wind, generate AC current. For DC transmission, you have to convert AC to DC and then back again. In the beginning, this conversion was very difficult, but people kept trying. GE was actually very early in the game. In the 1930s, they built an experimental HVDC line using mercury arc rectifiers to convert the current and ran it 23 miles from Mechanicville to Schenectady in New York, where GE had its headquarters. But back then, the converters were still very expensive and GE didn’t see the potential of the technology. The first true commercial HVDC line didn’t happen until the 1950s. We started slowly building from there, and even a decade ago, HVDC was still quite a niche industry. It wasn’t really big at all. But in the last 10 years, the explosion in the number of projects around the world has been phenomenal.

GER: What happened?

CD: It’s a number of things. People want more power all the time, but it’s hard to build overhead lines for environmental reasons. One way to build new links is to bury the cables underground, and it’s much cheaper to do that with DC than with AC. Plus, of course, we’ve got renewables, particularly here in Europe, where we have a lot of offshore wind. Wind farms make a huge difference in the way electricity’s generated, but they are often in the wrong place. Germany’s a case in point. They shut down their nuclear power plants, which are mainly in the south of the country, but they have a lot of wind generation up north. They need a way to ship power across the country, and they’re building HVDC corridors to transmit some of that power.

In North America, it’s picking up too. The U.S. has three AC grids: the eastern grid, the western grid and Texas, which wanted its grid to stay out of reach of federal regulators by not crossing state lines. You also have [the Canadian province of] Quebec doing its own thing, too. So there you have four large AC areas in North America potentially operating at different frequencies. But an HVDC link can tie them all together and allow them to exchange electricity, for example.

GER: How does HVDC do this?

CD: HVDC converters can essentially manufacture and match the frequency at which the destination grid operates. Without getting too much into the details, the converter at the end of the line can essentially behave like a traditional generator with a power source that can be turned on or off very quickly. So when something changes, it can quickly compensate.

GER: I think we have to slow down a little.

CD: OK. So the voltage and direction of the alternating current switches, or alternates, back and forth at a set frequency described by sine waves. The HVDC technology we are developing here in Stafford can chop up the sine waves of the alternating current into smooth DC lines in the converter station at the beginning of the HVDC link. From there, the DC travels over a cable to the converter at the end of the link, where another converter rebuilds it into the desired AC sine waves that precisely match the characteristics of the destination AC grid.

GER: How do you chop the AC up?

CD: You use a device called a rectifier, which straightens the AC sine waves. The first such device was the mercury arc rectifier. That was the grandfather technology they used for the Mechanicville line. These rectifiers were based on technology similar to the glowing tubes inside old televisions, but scaled up. As the industry evolved, it embraced semiconductor devices, like thyristors and special transistors. The latest version — power transmission’s equivalent of a 4K TV set, if you will — is a semiconductor device called insulating gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). We use IGBTs to build up a system called a voltage source converter (VSC). These power electronics are much smaller and much more efficient and powerful than anything in the past.

You can think of a converter using VSC technology as a black box that allows you to break down and build up any sine wave you want. Inside the black box there are lots and lots of little individual VSC converters, controlled by a computer, that step up or step down a wave by 2,000-volt increments. It’s kind of like a lot of square pixels on a computer screen forming a circle, one step at a time.

GER: Two thousand volts? That seems like a lot! Wouldn’t the circle be too choppy?

CD: Two thousand volts in our industry is quite small. We have hundreds of these converters — we call them submodules — lined up in a series. The submodules are connected in a series to make “valves,” and six valves — two for each phase of the AC system — go to make up the complete converter. We can quite easily produce a sine wave of about 400,000 volts with lots and lots of little steps in it, so it’s a very good approximation of the sine curve.

John Vodden (left) and Jeremy Snazell led the development of GE’s new HVDC test facility in Stafford, England. “…We built a torture chamber for valves,” Vodden says. “It’s all set up to recreate what life is really like and also to give that little valve a hard time.” Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

GER: Why do you call the converter a valve?

CD: For historical reasons. In the early days of HVDC, the mercury arc rectifier was actually a valve. The electric current would boil off a small pool of mercury at the bottom of the rectifier and the current would travel through the resulting vapor. The mercury condensed on the walls of the valve, which were kept a little cooler than the rest of the valve for that purpose, and was returned to the bottom in a continuous cycle — like water evaporating from the sea, forming clouds and then falling as rain on the land, which then flows back to sea. When semiconductors replaced them in the 1960s and 1970s, people wondered what to call the new things and the name “valve” stuck.

GER: What is the advantage of valves made from semiconductors?

CD: It’s similar to computer chips. They need a lot less maintenance and they don’t suffer from a phenomenon called “arc-back,” where a mercury arc valve would suddenly and undesirably start to conduct electricity in the “wrong” direction, which is a problem since they are supposed to be rectifiers and therefore only conduct in one direction. The rest of the system had to be tolerant of such effects because it proved impossible to completely eliminate them.

GER: When you talk about efficiency, do you mean the amount of AC you can convert to DC and back without losing power?

CD: Exactly. Today, we can build converter stations that are more than 99% efficient. Since you have two of them, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the line, it bumps down to 98%, minus what you lose in the transmission line itself. These losses depend on the length of the line; obviously the longer the line the more you will lose, but it is normally in the range of 1-5%.

GER: You mentioned the explosion in HVDC projects over the last 10 years and the fact that it allows countries to ship electricity over long distances and to synchronize AC grids. Are there any other benefits?

CD: Absolutely. HVDC is really good at integrating wind and solar power into the grid. There is now so much renewable energy in the U.K., we recently had an entire week without coal generation, which was a first. As I already mentioned, HVDC converters can simulate large generators and help stabilize grids supplied by renewables.

GER: Why does it matter?

CD: The trouble with renewable sources is that they don’t have what’s called “inertia.” For most of the last century, since the beginning of electrification, we relied on big, heavy, rotating generators inside thermal power plants weighing hundreds of tons and spinning at a constant rate. These generators had a massive amount of inertia, like a merry-go-round with lots of kids on it. This inertia meant that if somebody turned off a machine somewhere, the frequency at which the generators were spinning didn’t change measurably, kind of like a kid dropping off the carousel.

But as these power plants are gradually getting phased out — think of coal-fired plants — and replaced with much smaller wind turbines that spin according to different wind speeds, the grid’s inertia also gets smaller. This means that when some large device or a factory connects to or disconnects from an AC grid supplied mainly by renewables, the frequency is going to change much more quickly and make the grid much twitchier.

Low inertia also means that when some disturbance happens on the system — say, lightning from a severe storm — it can travel across wider parts of the country faster than before. Fifty years ago, lights would flicker within a radius of 30 to 50 miles. Now the same fault would be felt over double the distance.

Since VSC converters can produce an alternating current of any frequency, they allow you to bring the AC grid back to normal when the frequency stops dropping or rising.

GER: How long have you been working on HVDC?

CD: I’ve been working here for more than 30 years.

GER: That’s a long time! Very few people give a thought to how they get their electricity. What do you tell strangers on a plane when they ask you what you do? What keeps you coming to work?

CD: Oh, it’s the fact that every day you keep learning new things. You never know all there’s to know about HVDC. The subject is far too complicated and far too varied. That’s the reason you get people like me who’ve blundered into this industry by accident and stayed in it.

GER: By accident?

CD: It was my first job after university. I said, “Let’s see what it’s like and I’ll make the next step in one or two years.” I didn’t expect I would still be here.

The brick chimneys of Barcelona’s Poblenou district — the city’s old industrial quarter, squeezed between the avant-garde towers of Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral and the Mediterranean Sea — have lain dormant for decades. But industry is gradually returning to the proud, hardworking barrio. For example, a former cutlery factory now serves as offices for GE Renewable Energy, housing a high-tech nerve center that monitors and controls a decent chunk of southern Europe’s burgeoning wind energy industry. “Anyone walking past on the street can see it,” says Jose Miguel Garate, the senior engineer at GE Renewable Energy responsible for overseas fleet reliability in Europe, gesturing at the large windows that look out onto the leafy streets of Poblenou. Passersby peeking in can track a ticker keeping score — on a minute-by-minute basis — of the total power output of the turbine fleet it monitors, the number of European households it can support, and the estimated amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions saved.

But openness has its limits, even in hip Barcelona. Called a remote operations center, or ROC, the facility takes over a secure room adjacent to the foyer of the building. The impressive installation brings to mind a trading desk or a NASA mission control center. During a visit last week, technicians huddled in front of laptops and a huge TV screen showing a map of Europe peppered with wind turbine icons. Human as well as artificial intelligence allow GE to continuously fine-tune the operations of the more than 2,000 wind turbines located in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Greece. Using software that securely gathers and analyzes millions of data points, workers here can, without ever leaving the control room, instantly address most turbine issues and ensure that turbines capture as many kilowatt-hours as possible. “The software is the first line of defense against operational problems,” Garate explains. ”It captures all the events from the wind turbines.”

Top: The remote operation’s center in Barcelona allows GE to continuously fine-tune the operations of the more than 2,000 wind turbines located in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Greece. Above: The just-completed Fokida wind farm in Greece is using GE wind turbines. Images credit: GE Renewable Energy.

Walking over to one of the computers, he zooms in on a wind turbine in northern France that has just flagged a minor yaw system issue, which means that the angle of the unit’s rotor is slightly off, given the wind direction. The technician seated at the desk quickly realigns the turbine’s rotor with a few clicks of a mouse, explaining that the unit will return to capturing maximum wind energy in a matter of minutes.

In fact, the ROCs can solve 80 percent of wind turbine issues in under 10 minutes. If issues turn out to be larger mechanical problems, an engineer can be on the site to fix the equipment within hours. “The software is helping us to respond faster and faster to issues,” Garate says.

The Barcelona location is GE Renewable Energy’s fourth ROC, and together with sister centers in Schenectady, New York; Salzbergen, Germany; and Bangalore, India, it keeps tabs on more than 15,000 onshore and offshore turbines, as well as solar and energy storage assets around the world.

Together, the ROCs have been able to increase the productivity of the energy assets they monitor by 20 percent. Those gains alone are enough to supply a small country, Garate says.

But the ROCs are more than just fast-twitch troubleshooters. They also allow wind power producers to squeeze new efficiencies and deeper insights from their operations over the long term. Back in Barcelona, the ROC is already running the numbers on the French yaw issue. The software, which runs on GE’s software platform for the industrial internet of things, has logged the event along with other yaw-related alerts in the region and has started crunching the data to find patterns that could sharpen the ROC’s reaction time in the future. “This ROC isn’t just a nice way to show customers how their fleet is performing,” Garate says. “We’ll keep improving the algorithms that are behind these screens so that they can maximize their wind power generation and minimize their costs.”

More wind turbine icons are set to join the giant map at the Barcelona ROC, including new wind farms being built by Forestalia in the neighboring Spanish province of Aragon. “This offers customers in Spain data-driven insights, expert recommendations and advanced field services less than 300 miles away in their own language,” Garate says. The Barcelona ROC is also standing by to monitor GE’s largest-ever onshore wind turbine, the Cypress platform, which will join European grids later this year.

In the meantime, the new ROC seems to have found a perfect home in the resurgent district of Poblenou, which is rapidly turning into the breeding ground for Barcelona’s most promising startups. “We are supposed to live in a digital world, and the customers are always expecting more — and we’re ready to deliver,” Garate says.

Today GE released its second-quarter results for 2019. On balance, while we are seeing progress across our businesses, we clearly have more work to do in what remains a reset year for GE. Below are some select highlights from our results, and I encourage you to read the full materials and listen to our earnings call on GE’s investor website.

• Topline strength, including organic orders* growth up 4 percent compared to the second quarter of 2018, industrial segment organic revenue* growth of 7 percent, and backlog up 11 percent, partially driven by GE Aviation’s record wins at the Paris Air Show.
• Adjusted EPS* of $0.17, including a $0.06 benefit from resolving a tax audit matter.
• Industrial organic profit margins* contracted by 300 basis points, driven by declines in GE Power, GE Renewable Energy, and to a lesser extent GE Aviation, but still in line with our first-half plan.
• Adjusted Industrial free cash flows* of negative $1 billion, at the high end of the range GE’s CFO Jamie Miller mentioned at the Goldman Sachs Industrials Conference in May.
• Progress on improving our financial position, including selling down part of our stake in Wabtec and reducing GE Capital assets by $2 billion and external debt by $2 billion.
• As a result of strategically moving the lower-margin equipment/services business within Grid Solutions from Power to Renewables and moving the digital parts of Grid to GE Digital, we recorded a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of $744 million. The combination of Grid Solutions with Renewable Energy creates an end-to-end clean energy offering for our customers.

Due to improvements in GE Power, lower restructuring, higher earnings, and better visibility in the first half of 2019, GE also announced adjustments to its full-year outlook:

• Increased Industrial free cash flows* outlook range to $(1) billion to $1 billion (from the previous $(2) billion to zero).
• Increased organic revenue* outlook to growth in the mid-single-digit range (from low to mid-single digit).
• Increased adjusted EPS*outlook to $0.55 to $0.65 (from $0.50 to $0.60)
• No change to margin outlook at flat to +100 basis points
• Decreased restructuring spend outlook (cash at $1.5+ billion for the year, from $2+ billion previously, and expense at $1.7 billion to $2 billion, from $2.4 billion to $2.7 billion previously).

As GE’s Chairman and CEO Larry Culp said in our press release, “We made steady progress on our strategic priorities in the second quarter … We will continue to take planned actions to improve our businesses and monitor some market headwinds. We remain focused on driving continuous improvement and delivering for our customers, and I am encouraged by our team’s progress and dedication to date.”

We’ve also announced this morning that Jamie Miller will be transitioning from her role as CFO and GE has initiated a search to identify its next CFO. Jamie has agreed to remain in her role and will assist with a smooth transition. As Larry noted in the announcement, Jamie has been instrumental in developing our portfolio strategy and spearheading our deleveraging plan during our transformation. Jamie has been at GE for 11 years in a number of roles. She is a great leader, colleague and friend to so many of us here.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions, comments or suggestions. Thank you for your continued interest in GE.

Steve Winoker
VP Investor Communications

Important information about our forward-looking statements.
*Non-GAAP measure

Non-GAAP Financial Measures:
In this document, we sometimes use information derived from consolidated financial data but not presented in our financial statements prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Certain of these data are considered “non-GAAP financial measures” under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules. These non-GAAP financial measures supplement our GAAP disclosures and should not be considered an alternative to the GAAP measure. The reasons we use these non-GAAP financial measures and the reconciliations to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q and the GE earnings supplemental information package posted to the investor relations section of our website at www.ge.com, as applicable.

Our financial services business is operated by GE Capital Global Holdings LLC (GECGH). In this document, we refer to GECGH as “GE Capital”. We refer to the industrial businesses of the Company including GE Capital on an equity basis as “GE”. “GE (ex-GE Capital)” and /or “Industrial” refer to GE excluding GE Capital.

GE’s Investor Relations website at www.ge.com/investor and our corporate blog at www.gereports.com, as well as GE’s Facebook page and Twitter accounts, contain a significant amount of information about GE, including financial and other information for investors. GE encourages investors to visit these websites from time to time, as information is updated and new information is posted.

Speed and comfort are high on the list of business travelers, which is why France’s La Compagnie is operating a business-class-only daily flight between Newark Liberty Airport and Orly, two airports close to the business hubs of New York and Paris.

Trans-Atlantic routes are typically served by large, wide-body jets powered by two or four engines. But being able to sustain a specialized business-only service became easier in May, as La Compagnie started flying a next-generation, smaller, single-aisle A321neo jet on the Paris to New York route. In the past, single-aisle jets typically flew shorter routes spanning countries and continents. But the new Airbus plane is powered by ultra-efficient CFM LEAP engines, which provide double-digit gains in fuel efficiency and allow the plane fly further on a single tank on fuel while also lowering carbon emissions, oxides of nitrogen emissions and noise. This is a win for the passengers, the airline and the planet.

France-based La Compagnie was founded in 2013 and flies regular direct routes between Orly and Newark and Nice and Newark. The A321neo is a single-aisle plane that La Compagnie has configured with 76 lie-flat seats. It replaces older Boeing equipment the airline had been using on the route since last year. One of two additional A321neo planes destined for La Compagnie was on display at the Paris Air Show in June, as the European aerospace company celebrated its 50^th anniversary.

The CFM LEAP engines powering the plane are built by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines. CFM engineers were able to slash its fuel consumption by 15% compared with the engine’s predecessor, the CFM56, by using breakthrough materials and technologies. For example, one of the engine’s smaller parts, a metal fuel-nozzle tip the size of a walnut that sprays fuel into the combustor, is so complex that the only way to make it involves 3D-printing it directly from a computer file. “The technology was incredible,” said Mohammad Ehteshami, a GE engineer involved in developing the nozzle. “In the design of jet engines, complexity used to be expensive. But [3D printing] allows you to get sophisticated and reduces costs at the same time. This is an engineer’s dream. I never imagined that this would be possible.”

Above: La Compagnie brought a brand-new Airbus A321neo jet powered by a pair of LEAP-1A engines to Paris on Tuesday. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports. Top image credit: Alex Schroff for GE Reports.

GE also developed a special material called ceramic matrix composite that can handle temperatures approaching 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, where even the most advanced alloys grow soft. In addition to being more heat-resistant, the ceramic matrix composite is lighter than metal. The LEAP engine also features a combustor design that reduces NOx emissions by 50% compared to the standards set by the Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection, according to CFM.

To date, the LEAP engine has logged nearly five million flight hours in service with more than 100 operators worldwide, and it’s believed that a clear majority of new single-aisle aircraft on order today will be using LEAP engines. Single-aisle jets are the fastest-growing segment of the airline industry, according to the International Air Transport Association, given that engines like the LEAP model allow jets to fly longer distances. Last April, for instance, a LEAP-engine-powered Airbus A321neo LR loaded with 162 dummy passengers and 16 crew completed a test flight from Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, to the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean that lasted 11 hours and covered 5,466 miles. It was the longest distance flight in the certification process of the A321neo.

A great way to experience Wisconsin involves a plate of fresh, deep-fried cheese curds and a cold glass of Spotted Cow farmhouse ale — which is available only within state borders. It’s really good stuff, regardless of what your doctor says. But there’s also another loftier and, in a way, lighter way to get to know America’s Dairyland. It’s open only for a week in late July and leads to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s EAA AirVenture fly-in in Oshkosh, possibly the largest gathering of pilots and aviation fans anywhere in the world.

This July, Oshkosh, as the event is known among pilots, celebrated 50 years in the Wisconsin town and attracted some 700,000 visitors and more than 10,000 planes, helicopters and other aircraft, including some in the strangest shapes. A good number of these flying vehicles relied on engines from GE Aviation, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. We took a stroll around the world’s busiest airfield — another weeklong Oshkosh distinction — to look for GE tech. Here’s what we found, and more.

Above: GE Aviation is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. The GE unit got its start in aviation by developing turbosuperchargers for planes like Doc, a beautifully restored B-29 Superfortress originally built in March 1945. Top image: Every afternoon in Oshkosh belongs to an airshow. Images credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

The B-17 bomber Yankee Lady, on display in Oshkosh, also relied on GE turbosuperchargers. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

GE’s expertise in turbosuperchargers allowed the company to develop the first American jet engine in 1942. Since then, its engines have powered many different planes, both civilian and military, like this Northrop T-38 Talon. (The tail of Doc is in the background.) Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

U.S. Marines and their F/A-18 jets rely on GE’s F404 jet engines. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

The C-5M Supergalaxy drew a big crowd. This plane uses the new military version of GE’s CF6 engine, called GE F138. Each of the Supergalaxy’s four engines provides 50,000 pounds of thrust and allows the plane to meet new noise-reduction requirements. Although the Galaxy is a military transport plane, it helped launch GE into the commercial aviation business. The jet’s original TF39 engines used a design called a high-bypass turbofan, which placed a big fan up front to generate thrust in combination with a jet. GE quickly saw the commercial potential of the turbofan engine and built a passenger version called the CF6. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports. 

Besides Oshkosh and GE, yet another aviation legend was celebrating its anniversary in Oshkosh this year: The iconic Boeing 747 turned 50. GE didn’t produce engines for the first batch of 747s, but its workhorse CF6 engines soon took roost under their wings. Today, many jumbo jets in service are using them, including Air Force One and GE’s own Flying Test Bed. GE Aviation also developed the GEnx-2B engine for the latest generation of the plane, the 747-8, like this brand-new UPS freighter. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

GE engines galore. A pair of GEnx-2B engines up front on the wing of a Boeing 747-8, and a GEnx-1B engine in the back on a United Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

While GE developed the world’s largest and most powerful engine, the GE9X, this HF120 engine, developed jointly with Honda for the HondaJet, is the smallest jet engine in its portfolio. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

This mean-looking A-10 Warthog jet carries a pair of GE’s TF34 engines. The civilian version of the engine, CF34, powers many regional and commuter jets, including Bombardier and EMBRAER planes. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

GE Aviation makes much more than just jet engines. This AH-64 Apache helicopter is using a pair of GE’s T700 engines. In February, the Department of Defense awarded GE a $517 million contract to manufacture its next-generation T901 engines for thousands of Black Hawk and Apache helicopters. Image credit: Getty Images.

GE also brought to Oshkosh the Catalyst, the first turboprop developed from the ground up in 50 years. The engine uses components originally developed for supersonic jet engines, 3D-printed parts and, for the first time, FADEC. “Everything is new on the Catalyst,” says engineer Simone Castellani (above). Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

The Nextant G90XT, a remodeled King Air aircraft, uses GE electronics and GE H75 engines. “You step into the cockpit and you are looking at six levers to control the typical King Air,” says Nextant’s Randy Znamenak. “With GE’s electronic control, the G90XT integrates a single power lever for each engine that controls and synergizes the throttle and the propeller.” Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

A GE H85 engine powers this Thrush crop duster. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

Many GE Aviation employees are pilots. Ashley Ringer flew herself and her husband, Trevor, to Oshkosh this year. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

Oshkosh is an aviation festival and many people camp next to their planes. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

Flyovers feature planes old and new. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

The aircraft include some in the strangest shapes. These Long-EZ planes were designed by the legendary designer Burt Rutan. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

Rutan, in the middle, is a regular at Oshkosh. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

More than 10,000 people arrived in their own planes. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

Some parked their planes at a “sea base” on the shores of nearby Lake Winnebago. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

This year there was also a jet-powered truck, the Shockwave Jet Truck driven by Chris Darnell. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

Oshkosh always puts on a great nighttime air show. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports. 

Then you know it’s time to go home. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Reports.

Scientists found a “don’t eat me” signal that cancer cells use to hide from the immune system, a new green nanotechnology could help clean up microplastics pollution from the world’s waterways, and a Chinese algorithm is coming for our jobs. Like, our jobs, specifically: It’s an algorithm that makes readable news stories out of complicated scientific studies. Until that happens, though, here’s this week’s (entirely human-made, handcrafted, organic and artisanal) roundup of the coolest scientific discoveries on the planet.

Cell Defense

Above: Cancer cells emit a “don’t eat me” signal to shield themselves from the immune system — and that doctors might be able to block. Top and above images credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine discovered what they call a “don’t eat me” signal emitted by cancer cells — which, as its name suggests, discourages the immune system from eating, or otherwise attacking, the cancer.

Why does it matter? If the signal could be blocked or turned off, it would boost the immune system’s ability to fight cancer: Implanting human cancer into mice, the researchers demonstrated that blocking the signal — called CD24 — enabled the immune cells to go after the unwanted cells.

How does it work? Normally it’s the job of immune cells called macrophages to detect unwanted cells, “then engulf and devour them,” according to Stanford. In recent years, scientists have discovered proteins on cell surfaces that send the don’t-eat-me signal to the macrophages — fine enough for normal cells that shouldn’t be eaten, but it can also be used by cancer cells to essentially hide from the immune system. “You know that if cancers are growing in the presence of macrophages, they must be making some signal that keeps those cells from attacking the cancer,” said Amira Barkal, a Stanford MD-PhD student and the lead author of a new study published in Nature. “You want to find those signals so you can disrupt them and unleash the full potential of the immune system to fight the cancer.”

Magnetic Appeal

Plastic pollution is a huge problem in the world’s waterways. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? A team led by researchers at Australia’s University of Adelaide developed a system of “tiny coil-shaped carbon-based magnets” to break down the microplastics plaguing today’s waters.

Why does it matter? Earlier this year, a researcher from Bangor University in Wales said the problem of microplastics pollution was “absolutely everywhere”— in lakes, rivers, oceans and even groundwater around the world. The effects of microplastics on aquatic ecosystems and human health are still poorly understood, though early indications aren’t promising. Adelaide chemical engineering professor Shaobin Wang, senior author of the new study in Matter, said, “Microplastics absorb organic and metal contaminants as they travel through water and release these hazardous substances into aquatic organisms when eaten, causing them to accumulate all the way up the food chain.”

How does it work? Disposing of microplastics requires that they be broken down even further, via chemical reaction, into tinier pieces that can dissolve harmlessly in water — but many of the chemicals that can do this themselves require harmful pollutants to produce. The Adelaide researchers found a greener route by lacing carbon nanotubes with nitrogen, which helps generate the chemicals that decompose microplastics. They also injected the tubes with a tiny bit of manganese, making them slightly magnetic — and easy to collect and use again after they’ve finished a cleanup job.

Dr. Robot

AI can help docs detect signs of acute kidney injury up to two days before it occurs. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Google’s artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, says it’s developed an algorithm that can alert doctors to signs of acute kidney injury in human patients up to 48 hours before it occurs.

Why does it matter? Acute kidney injury, or AKI, causes a buildup of waste products in the blood, can require timely dialysis to treat and is often linked to other health problems — according to the health news website STAT, the DeepMind researchers have been trying to help doctors keep “frail” patients from descending into a “life-threatening spiral.” Early signs of problems like AKI often get lost in a mountain of other patient data; having AI trained to search them out would enable doctors to swiftly treat the problem. “Giving doctors a head start on these major causes of patient deterioration that contribute to the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people every year could be absolutely transformative,” said DeepMind’s Dominic King.

How does it work? As described in a letter to Nature, study leaders trained an algorithm to look for patterns in the electronic health records of more than 700,000 patients in Veterans Affairs hospitals in the U.S. Though it ended up being able to predict 90% of AKI episodes up to 48 hours ahead, there remain some kinks to be worked out: particularly a high false-positive rate and the fact that the data the AI learned on skewed heavily toward male patients; only 6% of it came from women.

The Protein Switch

LOCKR is a molecular switch made of multiple interacting parts: a ‘key’ (black) unlocks a ‘cage’ (grey), revealing a bioactive peptide (yellow) which can interact with other molecules in the cell. Caption and image credit: University of Washington.

What is it? Meet LOCKR: the “first completely artificial protein switch that can work inside living cells to modify — or even commandeer — the cell’s complex internal circuitry,” developed by scientists at the University of Washington Medicine Institute for Protein Design and the University of California, San Francisco.

Why does it matter?“The ability to control cells with designer proteins ushers in a new era of biology,” said Hana El-Samad, a UCSF professor of biochemistry and the co-author of a pair of papers on the finding, both published in Nature. “In the same way that integrated circuits enabled the explosion of the computer chip industry, these versatile and dynamic biological switches could soon unlock precise control over the behavior of living cells and, ultimately, our health.”

How does it work? Proteins have a part in “almost all of the interesting things that happen in your body,” according to a summary of the findings in The Washington Post. Researchers have long tried to tweak them to better serve us, a tricky proposition because proteins don’t just have a single function — so reprogramming them could have unwanted effects. It’s better to just create a protein switch from scratch that can be programmed to do one thing and one thing only. LOCKR switches could direct cells to “modify gene expression, redirect cellular traffic, degrade specific proteins, and control protein binding interactions,” and could lead to new therapies for cancer and immune disorders. The researchers who created LOCKR hope it will be played around with by the scientific community at large: They’ve taken out patents for its commercial use, but made the DNA blueprints available to academics.

Bleep Bloop Bleep

Illustration credit: Getty Images.

What is it? A team from a Chinese newspaper and Peking University has created Xiaoke, a “robot science reporter”: It’s an artificial intelligence algorithm that reads the abstracts of papers published in journals like Science and Nature, then summarizes them in easy-to-digest news stories.

Why does it matter? I mean, it’s not like I need a job or anything.

How does it work? In reality, the scientific-article-summarizing AI is not as alarming as it sounds: Its creators envision it not just as a way for newspapers to spread scientific news, but for researchers in China to get quick, accurate access to the latest advances described in English-language journals. After Xiaoke submits a first draft, the article are reviewed by scientists and newspaper editors who determine whether the content is good to go, or if it needs additional information. If you read Chinese, you can check out some of Xiaoke’s work here. See you next week. I hope!

The state of South Carolina may have practically invented the punishing workout. It is home to The Citadel, the famously tough military academy — and anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” will never forget drill instructor Gunnery Sgt. Hartmann inflicting a special kind of purgatory on U.S. Marine Corps recruits at Parris Island. The city of Greenville, which is just a couple hundred miles north of the military installation, is also home to an equally grueling boot camp. But there is a major difference: Greenville’s trainees are not fresh cadets, but a crop of elite power plants.

This summer, the 9HA.02, the world’s largest and most efficient heavy-duty gas turbine will be put through its paces in the toughest power plant proving course on earth: Greenville’s huge off-grid gas turbine validation facility located behind GE Power’s massive turbine factory here. And the drill sergeant is the calm, genial Bert Stuck, who has worked for GE Aviation and Power departments for 37 years. The veteran engineer laughs at the notion that his turbine test stand is a giant torture chamber. “Not quite: Our motto is ‘test and learn’,” he says.

Even so, Stuck and his team of engineers will push the 9HA.02 to its limits before it is deployed in the field, generating power for homes and businesses all over the world. They have got a full program of exercises in store for the turbine, which can generate 571 megawatts, enough to power a city with 650,000 households. “We will explore the turbine’s entire operational envelope — inside and out,” says the veteran engineer. That is jargon for the range of parameters in which the turbine can operate safely and effectively. It’s important to punish the machine in this way because it proves to customers that the turbines — which will one day be the grid’s workhorses — can withstand ultra-stressful conditions that are well beyond what they would encounter in ordinary service.

Engineers will test the turbine’s mettle in all areas. Stuck reels off a list: “Performance, efficiency, operational flexibility, mechanical and aeromechanical durability, gas and liquid fuel capability, its response to grid fluctuations, and so on.”

Above: The largest and most efficient heavy-duty gas turbine in the world, the 9HA.02 will be deployed everywhere from Malaysia to northern Europe — so it’s vital that it work at its peak in a wide range of conditions. Top: At the Greenville test stand, engineers will push the 9HA.02 to its limits before it is deployed in the field, generating power for homes and businesses all over the world. Top and above images credit: Brian Erkens of Reel Video and Stills.

For example, engineers will ensure the 9HA.02 delivers top-tier performance and efficiency whatever the location. “We will have units going anywhere from Malaysia to northern Europe,” says Stuck. Engineers have a trick up their sleeves for replicating sweltering hot, and freezing cold days, and it is not turning the thermostat up to maximum, or down to zero. “We play with certain factors such as airflows or fuel splits to make the unit ‘think’ it is operating in different conditions,” says Stuck.

This may sound like random tinkering, but in reality, the testing stand is as far away from a mad professor’s laboratory as you can get. Every step taken during the test has been simulated by a team of turbine and plant controls experts before it is run in the test stand.  “We want to understand how the test unit and facility will perform together,” says Stuck.  “The simulations give us an excellent idea of what is going to happen.”

Although there are rarely big surprises, the testing procedure is still a huge learning experience. There are around 5,000 instruments across the turbine that continually gather data about its operations, performance and efficiency. These sensors ferry about 1 gigabyte of data per second to Greenville’s nerve center, a bank of computers manned by around 75 design engineers that resemble NASA’s mission control. “That’s like streaming a full hour of Netflix in one second,” says Stuck.

Safety is paramount, so the engineers stay alert for any data readings which look unusual. “That’s priority No. 1 — although we have a good chance of catching anything before it breaks,” says Stuck. He explains that a test director can easily return the turbine to a safe operating point before any component failure.

“Then they’ll start reviewing the data,” says Stuck. Engineers will dive into data streams on everything from component temperatures, airflow and cooling rates, air pressure, blade vibrations, fuel economy, efficiency and power output. “The design teams can get an idea of how the unit is functioning in real-time, as well as analyzing data streams post-event,” says Stuck.

Engineers are hunting for any marginal gain in performance or efficiency that might be up for grabs. It might lead to last-minute fine-tuning, even if it is just a tiny tweak to the shroud or aerofoil of a turbine blade for greater durability, or a small adjustment to the geometry of an extraction port to optimize cooling flows. “We make these kinds of hardware modifications in the factory to actual production units for the benefit of the customer,” says Stuck.

Turbines in Greenville train as hard as U.S. marine recruits at Parris Island, whose boot camps usually last 13 weeks. The 9HA.02 will undergo about 200 hours of test time over nearly three months, and those grueling sessions will last between 12 hours and two days.

In the test facility, some 5,000 sensors gather data from across the machine before transmitting it to a mission-control-like nerve center, where dozens of engineers hunt for any marginal gains in performance or efficiency that can be wrought. Image credit: Brian Erkens of Reel Video and Stills.

It is crucial to test the 9HA.02 at varying load conditions and demonstrate the capability to handle a significant number of starts. The world’s gas turbines are increasingly required to operate across a wide range of loads and operating modes such as cyclic (daily starts and stops) and peaking— the hours of high demand — because of the growth of renewables such as wind and solar. For example, utilities might switch off the 9HA.02 during periods of healthy renewable energy generation and low demand and switch it back on when demand picks up and solar or wind generation have slumped. “From no load conditions, it can reach full power in about 10 minutes,” says Stuck.

This kind of special testing simply cannot be done at the customer site. Greenville is like a special indoor soft play area that allows the engineers to push the turbine to its limits risk-free because the site is not connected to the grid. “That means we can replicate oddball conditions without the danger of tripping any grid,” explains Stuck.

Some extreme forces and engineering are involved in creating those oddball conditions. This includes the channeling of ambient air that has been compressed at a 22:1 ratio into the turbine’s combustion chamber at a rate that would blow up a Goodyear Blimp in less than 10 seconds.

GE also built a dedicated liquid natural gas storage facility to supplement fuel flow to the turbines on the test stand and a special rail spur and a turntable to bring them in.

Despite the extraordinary nature of testing, the test stand produces very few external indications that anything special is happening.  Stuck points out the incongruity. “If you were standing just outside the building, you’d have no idea what’s going on inside — but you’ve basically got a full power plant on the stand.”

Stuck is scheduled to give another customer demonstration, but he is keen to reiterate the value of physical turbine tests before he goes. “Testing has paid for itself many times over,” he says. “You can run all the computer simulations you want, but you will always have things that you cannot simulate.”

Stuck would know. He has trained enough HA turbines to make up an entire squad: The 9HA.02 will be the fourth from the extraordinary turbine family to go on the stand at Greenville. “Our customers love the idea that we’re testing the turbines like this before they arrive,” says Stuck. “It gives them a massive level of confidence in our products.” Talk about positive energy.

Anyone who has ever seen a 3D printer would be forgiven for believing the boxy futuristic machine is good for one thing only: churning out industrial parts. They would be wrong.

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, allows engineers and designers to print complex metal parts directly from a computer file. This process does indeed provide the perfect process for creating intricate fuel nozzles for the GE9X, the world’s largest jet engine; ribbed gearbox covers for the GE Catalyst, the company’s new turboprop engine; alien-looking fuel heaters honeycombed with vessel-like channels; and many other heavy industrial items.

But increasingly, engineers and designers have been turning to 3D printing for a wide variety of projects, for the red carpet, new parents and elite athletes. Here are a few recent examples of how GE has helped:

A Dress Has Never Looked So Sweet

Not just a rose: GE Additive worked with designer Zac Posen to create a number of luminescent 3D-printed gowns and accessories for the Met Gala. Top and above images credit: Patrick Fraser.

What is it? British supermodel Jourdan Dunn charmed the crowd at the Met Gala in May with her blood-red gown in the shape of a rose. The lacquered dress, which looked like freshly poured candy, was a complex construction of folds and velvety swirls. The 21 petals and titanium cage holding them in place were entirely 3D-printed.

Why is it important? A 3D-printed dress at a celebrity event broadcast around the world demonstrates the breadth of this technology’s capabilities. The hope is that by showing how a technology more typically associated with components for jet engines, gas turbines and medical scanners can be used to create something of beauty and whimsy, more innovation will follow. After all, if you can 3D-print an enviable dress, what else can these machines produce for the world?

How was this possible? Designer Zac Posen worked with GE Additive design engineers and Protolabs, which specializes in plastic and metal additive prototypes, to create this rose gown and several other luminescent 3D designs for the Met Gala (including a shimmery purple palm leaf accessory Katie Holmes draped across her shoulders).

Bringing Ultrasounds To Life

In Brazil, 3D printing helped two expectant parents, both blind, meet the next addition to their family. Image credit: Ana Paula Silveira and Alvaro Zermiani.

What is it? Blind Brazilian parents could not see their son’s image on an ultrasound during pregnancy. Their doctor used a 3D printer to create lifelike models of the baby’s images which were originally captured on a GE ultrasound machine.

Why is it important? The moment when pregnant mom Ana Paula Silveira and her husband, Alvaro Zermiani, were able to touch their fetus helped them experience what many couples go through when they see their budding baby on an ultrasound screen. “Thanks to the exams and printing, we were able to not only know that our baby was growing healthy but also to have a very real contact and establish a very strong involvement with our son,” Silveira said. In addition to offering blind parents a heartfelt moment, the technology also provides a way for doctors to explain to all parents congenital defects such as cleft lips, abnormal extremities or abdominal wall defects. In some cases, 3D printing of ultrasound fetus images can also enhance discussions about surgical planning and serve as an educational tool.

How was this possible? Doctors collected the 3D images on a GE Voluson E10 ultrasound machine. It’s the first ultrasound system in the OB/GYN field with built-in 3D-printing capabilities.

Helping Dogs Get a Leg Up

Lucca, a 1-year-old Shih Tzu, was able to benefit from a cutting-edge technique in veterinary surgery that used 3D printing to fix his tiny bones in his right leg faster and more precisely than previously possible. Image credit: Langford Vets.

What is it? A British company 3D-prints bespoke surgical implants and “guides” for the veterinary market. These 3D-printed guides act like a kind of stencil for surgeons to follow when operating.

Why is it important? Veterinary surgeons typically have to visually estimate when deciding where to cut or manipulate their patients’ bones. A 3D-printed cutting guide offers them far great precision in surgery to, for instance, reposition a deformed bone.

How was this possible? Dr. Kevin Parsons, a small-animal orthopedic clinician at Langford Veterinary Services in Bristol, England, has been honing this technique for over two years. He takes computed tomography (CT) scans of his patients and sends the scans to CBM Wales, an advanced manufacturing research center that’s part of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Swansea. This facility, about an hour’s drive away from Parsons’ clinic, also creates a variety of 3D-printed images including aerospace components and human medical devices.

Paralympic Athlete Gets a Grip

Anna Grimaldi competes in the women’s long jump final at the World Para Athletics Championships in London in July 2017. Image credit: Shaun Brooks/Action Plus via Getty Images.

What is it? Gold-winning New Zealand Paralympic athlete now has a prosthetic arm that is, in part, 3D-printed. The new arm was made especially for Anna Grimaldi so she could grip a weightlifting bar, a feat that has eluded the athlete throughout her entire training career.

Why is it important? Grimaldi’s old prosthetic arm was “just an everyday child’s arm attachment, designed to lift a glass of water or a shopping bag,” she said. “It wasn’t designed to lift 50 kilograms off the ground.” Her new 3D-printed titanium arm helps her get a better grip on barbells since it was designed specifically to fit her stump and hold the weight. Bespoke prosthetics that have been 3D-printed will hopefully someday help thousands of people — even non-elite athletes — who struggle to get the right fit.

How was this possible? Zenith Tecnica, an Auckland-based company that specializes in a type of additive manufacturing known as electron beam melting (EBM), used printers built by Arcam EBM, a company that is part of GE Additive. It took the company just two hours to process the CAD file of Grimaldi’s prosthetic arm, translating the computerized blueprints into a layer-by-layer plan for the Arcam printer, and then 10 hours to print it, using titanium powder.

A few years ago, when Peter Green was recovering from shoulder surgery, he was determined to bounce back fully, insisting on getting the maximum physical therapy his insurance allowed. His exercises with a physical therapist after the procedure went great, but when it came time to do the strengthening exercises at his home in Helsinki, he just didn’t do them. “Physical therapy is boring,” Green says. “It often hurts. It’s not motivating.”

He’s not the only one who feels that way. Multiple studies show perhaps only a third of patients fully adhere to physical therapy regimens, a percentage that gets worse with self-guided exercises at home. For Green, CEO of a family-owned digital marketing company, Sensing Ltd., his uninspired experience provided a flash of inspiration: Why not make a game of physical therapy as a way to seduce people to do their prescribed exercises?

The result is Rehaboo! a company that is testing physical therapy-based games at a large children’s hospital in Finland with an eye toward improving health outcomes. Eventually, Green sees the company expanding to make a game of brief, beneficial exercise for the elderly and office workers.

In Rehaboo’s first game, the patient guides a character standing on a mine cart, which they move by doing squats. Points are scored by grabbing jewels with their arms from the ceiling of the mine shaft. Image credits: Rehaboo.

In Rehaboo’s first game — being piloted among children with foot and leg injuries — the patient guides a character standing on a mine cart, which they move by doing squats. Points are scored by grabbing jewels with their arms from the ceiling of the mine shaft. These moves, along with the squats, are designed by a Rehaboo physical therapist in conjunction with other medical professionals.

Rehaboo based the gameplay on the Hugo Troll Race, a free Danish game designed in 2012, while the motion engine is the Kinect engine developed for Microsoft’s Xbox. The system, which uses 3D cameras to sense body movement, is ideal because it doesn’t require any wires or controllers, making it simple to set up and play, Green explains. The score the patients accrue throughout the 90-second game is, in turn, useful data for medical professionals to have. “We are aiming for measurability so physical therapists can see if the patients have been doing their physical therapy at home,” says Green.

The game was designed for kids, but adults are keen to play as well. Rehaboo’s demonstrations drew large crowds at HIMSS & Health 2.0 Europe digital health conference in Helsinki this spring, getting even the vice minister of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport to stretch and squat.

Erik Gerritsen, vice minister of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, tries out Rehaboo’s physical therapy game earlier this spring at HIMSS & Health 2.0 Europe digital health conference in Helsinki. Image credit: Rehaboo. 

Gamification — making a game of something with a goal beyond entertainment — has been around in some form for at least a century, harkening back to when companies began giving loyal customers stamps and similar tchotchkes toward future merchandise. Over the past decade, gamification itself has become a multibillion-dollar business as organizations use video games as an enticing way to counter drug abuse or improve workflow in factories.

For Green, the opportunity to get Rehaboo up and running came when Helsinki University Hospital held a hackathon contest in 2016 on the theme of making its new children’s hospital a happier place. Rehaboo won and started piloting with children there this May. Another health care pilot is starting in August at Finland’s South Carelian Health Care District.

With his digital marketing background, Green’s lack of in-depth knowledge of health care could have been a shortcoming, but Rehaboo got a boost by locating itself in the GE Health Innovation Village. The village is an incubator inside GE Healthcare’s Helsinki offices, replete with meeting rooms, a basketball court and coffee bar. GE opened the facility in 2014 and now hosts more than three dozen startups all looking to shake up some aspect of health care. “Apart from being a really nice and innovative co-working space, one advantage is that GE Healthcare is right there,” he says. “We can have a meeting with them and ask them about regulatory stuff and we can even join GE Healthcare people in their customer meetings sometimes, which is really a win-win.”

At HIMSS & Health 2.0, GE even lent Rehaboo some space where it could show off its therapy games. As with most companies in the Health Innovation Village, the GE connection is simply collegial — Rehaboo is independently owned, with Green just having closed a recent round of venture capital funding with local investors.

Adults are keen to play, too. Longer-term, the office market is expected to be the largest segment, as Rehaboo bets employers will see benefits in getting workers to perform some exercises at their desks or around the office every hour or so. Image credit: Rehaboo. 

Green hopes the children’s physical therapy pilot will be a step toward European Union regulatory approval, which would make it simpler to sell into medical establishments. In the meantime, he plans to open offices in Denmark this year and in Austin, Texas, in 2020 as part of expanding Rehaboo into exercise games for assisted living facilities and corporate environments. A just-started pilot at an elderly housing facility in Finland is showing positive results, with two-thirds of its residents reporting they feel refreshed and empowered after playing, according to Green. Longer-term, the office market is expected to be the largest segment, as Rehaboo bets employers will see benefits in getting workers to perform some exercises at their desks or around the office every hour or so.

That means physical therapy could end up being the smallest business segment for Rehaboo by far, but no matter, Green says it will stay the core of the business. “The children’s hospitals are the most important audience because we want to make an impact,” he says. “We want to be a company with a purpose.”

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, not many GE Aviation engineers could walk as tall as John Blanton Sr. Then one of the company’s few high-ranking African Americans, he was known for doing things deemed impossible at the time. Such as charting a futuristic engine for the U.S. Air Force that could push a fighter jet to travel at Mach 3.5, equivalent to roughly 2,600 miles per hour — enough speed to get from New York City to Los Angeles in just over an hour. Or prototyping an engine that could enable planes to take off and land vertically. These engineering feats — as well as his work on a version of GE’s first supersonic engine— landed Blanton in GE Aviation’s Propulsion Hall of Fame in 1991.

But outside of the company’s sprawling complex of factories in southwest Ohio, it was a different story. When Blanton and his family first moved from upstate New York to Cincinnati in 1956, the Queen City was not especially welcoming. Blanton’s son, John Jr. (who they called Buddy), could not go to the swimming pool at Coney Island, one of the city’s local amusement parks. Nor could the family find housing in many neighborhoods. For three years, the Blantons would try to look at houses, only to get rejected for flimsy reasons, all of which seemed like code for racial discrimination.

Choosing engagement rather than conflict, Blanton got to work on improving his new city. He began volunteering in various capacities, eventually becoming a well-known and respected leader in the community. As a founding member and president of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, for example, he built a sustainable future for Cincinnati’s publicly owned bus system. He was also appointed to the Ohio Governor’s Coordinating Council on Drug Abuse, served as president of the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati, and even helped run a local chapter of the Boy Scouts. Though hardly a rabble-rouser, Blanton consistently sought justice and equality for marginalized Cincinnatians.

Top: John Blanton Sr. managed several key advanced engine technology programs before retiring in 1982 as general manager for commercial advanced engines and commercial engine programs. Image credit: GE Aviation. Above: The Blanton family on Mother’s Day in 1947. Image credit: Blanton family.

After his passing in 2003, Blanton’s story faded into the background. Photos of him lingered in old books and passing mentions remained in GE Aviation’s Propulsion Hall of Fame, but few younger employees knew about him — until one enthusiastic, history-minded 21-year-old came along.

GE Aviation is celebrating 100 years in business this year. Cole Massie, a new addition to the GE unit’s communications team, listened to a lecture from former company spokesman Rick Kennedy to learn more about his employer’s high-flying past. The highlights didn’t disappoint — the company built America’s first jet engine, for instance, and is preparing to launch the world’s largest — but he found himself transfixed by a single story: that of John Blanton Sr.

What struck Massie wasn’t Blanton’s mind-bending engineering, or his commitment to civic duty. It was his character. “You’ll hear around here that GE Aviation is ‘standing on the shoulders of giants,’” Massie said. “I had this traditional, larger-than-life, folklore image in my head, but I think John Blanton gave me a different perspective on that saying. He was humble, he was thoughtful, and he wasn’t flashy or showy in the slightest.”

Fascinated, Massie looked to Kennedy for information to write a profile for a company publication coinciding with Black History Month. He received a mountain of information, but Massie wondered if there might be more. He yearned to find out firsthand who Blanton was. How would his family describe him? Blanton’s obituary mentioned that his son, John Jr., was a retired physician who is now a medical school professor in Connecticut. Massie scoured the internet for his number, called him up, and upon speaking to him, discovered that John Jr.’s mother, Corinne Blanton, 96, was still living in Cincinnati.

John Blanton Sr. ran track at Purdue University and couldn’t compete in the Big Ten Championships because of his race, according to his wife, Corinne Blanton. Image credit: Blanton family.

Though Corinne Blanton had shied away from giving interviews in the past, her son convinced her to meet with Massie. She wound up spending two hours, in a recorded interview, poring over old clippings and photos, regaling him with stories about life with John — from their World War II-era courtship at Purdue University to his death in 2003.

Both Corinne Blanton and her son painted a portrait of a quiet, confident man, who steadfastly tended to his passions — work, family and community — regardless of hardships and obstacles. “I didn’t like Cincinnati at all when we moved here,” she told Massie. “For three years, we were living in a four-room apartment looking for the right house. We would find a house to look at, then heard all kinds of excuses about why we couldn’t see it. It was racial.”

The challenges also included persevering through the lower moments of his storied career, such as when two of his most ambitious projects — the Mach 3.5 engine and vertical takeoff and landing technology — failed to come to fruition. “That must have been so frustrating for him,” Massie said. “But the processes and the techniques [he developed for both products] were groundbreaking and used for decades after both projects ended.”

Massie also learned about the lighter moments of Blanton’s private life. Eventually, he and his wife built two different homes — both of which so pleased Blanton that he created his own model versions. After his retirement in 1982, the couple reveled in each other’s company, playing golf, reading The Wall Street Journal and visiting their grandchildren. While Blanton cherished time with his son and grandchildren, he was never one to coddle children. When their son was a baby, Corinne Blanton would overhear him babbling gibberish to his father — to which her husband would answer with straight, matter-of-fact sentences.

John and Corinne Blanton dance after his induction to the GE Aviation Propulsion Hall of Fame in 1991. Image credit: GE Aviation.

Despite his rocky start in Cincinnati, Blanton grew to become one of its most revered citizens. The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority, for which Blanton served as president from 1973 to 1979, for example, established the John W. Blanton Internship Program in his name in 2014, which seeks to develop leaders in public transportation. “I really do think he felt a deep obligation to give back to his community,” Blanton Jr. said. “And he was grateful for the opportunity to work for a company that encouraged that type of behavior.”

As the conversation with Corinne Blanton went on, she warmed up to the idea of talking to Massie. She concluded with no small amount of satisfaction: “We have covered a life.”

She also lit a path for another one. Massie said Blanton has become a role model for him in his own career. “I’m not going to be building jet engines that push a plane to Mach 3.5 anytime soon,” admitted Massie, who majored in public relations at Syracuse University. “But I can emulate the way he worked and lived — overcoming obstacles, solving problems, treating others with respect, advocating for marginalized groups and giving back. I think those are admirable characteristics that I can strive for not just at GE, but in life.”

In fact, Massie has already begun to do so. He penned a profile of John Blanton Sr. in February for GE Aviation’s blog. And this May, he’ll bring Blanton’s memory to life once more when he steps into the annual GE Aviation Propulsion Hall of Fame ceremony escorting Corinne Blanton herself.

John Blanton Sr. during his induction into the GE Aviation Propulsion Hall of Fame by then-CEO Brian Rowe. Image credit: GE Aviation.

John Blanton Sr. (right middle) in a 1970s advertisement for the Queen City Metro. Blanton worked for 26 years at GE Aviation, developing a reputation as a pioneer, an innovator and a risk-taker. Image credit: GE Aviation.

Norman Rockwell painted ad posters for GE, as did Herbert Bayer, the last living member of the Bauhaus movement. Cult science-fiction illustrator Dean Ellis drew the changing face of downtown America for a GE calendar. And the company published comic books illustrated by George “Inky” Roussos, who also worked on Batman.

Who says there’s no beauty in industry? GE has a decades-long tradition of employing talented painters and illustrators — collaborations that served both the company’s bottom line and, ultimately, America’s cultural heritage. These partnerships with now-famous artists demonstrate a powerful symbiosis: Just as the arts can inspire science, so can science inspire the arts.

Join us as we take a look back at GE’s colorful history.

Birth Of A Luminary

Above: Rockwell’s 1925 “What a Protection Electric Light Is,” courtesy of GE Lighting Institute. Top: Rockwell Kent’s mural “The Power of Electricity” was created for the World’s Fair. Image credit: Museum of Science and Innovation Schenectady.

GE’s marketing department saw something early on in Rockwell when it hired the artist and illustrator to create a series of paintings and drawings for a 1920s ad campaign promoting the company’s Mazda electric lamps. The painter created “at least 20 advertising illustrations” for GE, depicting ordinary Americans using the electric light in their daily routines. Seven of them — all large oil paintings whose influences range from the impressionists to the old masters — remain on display at Nela Park, GE Lighting’s historic campus in East Cleveland, Ohio.

Oh, The Places He’d Go

Years before he delighted kids with a cat in a hat and Sneetches with stars upon thars as Dr. Seuss, author Theodor Geisel was an adman who created pitches for “G-E.” Among his creations was “The Strange Case of Adlebert Blump” in the G-E Merchandiser, a publication targeting prospective retailers. Though the tale doesn’t rhyme, readers today would instantly recognize Seussian whimsy in its characters — elaborately mustachioed men, startled cats and droopy dogs. Geisel’s work with GE helped fund world travels with his wife — experiences that inspired a number of his beloved children’s books.

He Brought Good Things To Life

Kurt Vonnegut, third from left, takes notes during a VIP tour of GE’s Schenectady plant. The photo was preserved by Mary Robinson. Her father, Ollie M. Lyon Jr., was Vonnegut’s close friend and colleague in the GE PR department. He’s the man in the center in the three-piece suit. Image credit: Mary Robinson.

Before Kurt Vonnegut wrote the best-sellers “Slaughterhouse Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” he honed his storytelling skills as a GE publicist in Schenectady, New York. His job: to “hunt for stories at the Schenectady Works and keep a steady drumbeat of good news issuing from the plant.” According to the scholar Robert K. Musil, that meant visiting with scientists and chatting with them about their work. “Every so often a good story would come out of it,” Vonnegut said. And so it did, inspiring him to write his first novel, “Player Piano,” focusing on a dystopian world run by machines, “as a satire of one of the world’s largest corporations.”

Flight Of Fancy

It’s equipped with the world’s most powerful jet engine — and made entirely from manila folders. Image credit: Luca Iaconi-Stewart.

Can you make an exquisitely precise replica of an Air India Boeing 777 jet entirely out of paper? Luca Iaconi-Stewart did. Beginning as a high school student in the late 2000s, the young man spent nine years painstakingly reproducing every facet of the plane, right down to functioning thrust reversers, doors and tail fin. The model — all made from stiff manila folders, we’ll remind you — includes details like seatback entertainment systems and the hidden crew “rest module.” “I like the way the planes look and I love the engines,” Iaconi-Stewart told GE Reports. He’d studied components of the engine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose collection includes at least one GE design doubling as fine art: a sinuous composite fan blade for the GE90-115B, the world’s most powerful jet engine.

It’s Not All Just Mummies

Herbert Bayer’s GE vacuum tube poster. Image credit: Museum of Science and Innovation Schenectady.

Speaking of MoMA, the museum also displays the work of Bauhaus-trained designer Herbert Bayer, whose creations for GE included a techno-optimistic print of a giant vacuum tube titled “Electronics — A New Science for a New World.” You can find GE technology in a number of other private and public collections across the country, as well. To name just a couple: An image of aviator Amelia Earhart from her visit to GE labs is part of the GE collection at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, New York. And a decorative Halloween ad for light bulbs in the 1970s and 1980s is featured in the collection of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Collect It While You Can

Known for glowing, light-filled paintings like “Daybreak,” Maxfield Parrish got practice early in his career creating illustrations for the popular Edison Mazda Lamp Calendar. Image credit: Museum of Science and Innovation Schenectady.

Art collectors swoon over large, detailed posters from painter Maxfield Parrish, who got a hand from GE early in his career. Originally used as images for the immensely popular Edison Mazda Lamp Calendar from 1918 to 1934, Parrish illustrations like “Dream Light” and “Ecstasy” show the history of light that seems to glow from within the painting. It’s a technique he created using pure layering of color glazes — and it’s what brought collectors to his commercial works after his death in 1966. Looking for one of those calendars? Auctioneers have recently sold those Parrish-themed GE calendars for $500.

Parrish was just one of a dozen painters GE commissioned each year from 1925 to 1960 to create images for those calendars. Another American painter and illustrator, Rockwell Kent — known for his illustrations in “Moby Dick” — also created at least two paintings for the GE calendar series in the late 1940s. It’s Kent’s mural “The Power of Electricity,” though, created for the GE Building at the 1938 World’s Fair, that the art world remembers. Representing electricity’s role in man’s progress from obscurity to enlightenment, the mural was later moved to the now-demolished Albion Hotel in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

Machine Music

More recently, GE collaborated with DJs and musicians like Reuben Wu of Ladytron and Matthew Dear and asked them to turn the sounds of GE machines and technology into music. For example, GE set Dear up with a library of 1,000 sounds generated by machines spanning its entire industrial portfolio, from jet engines to MRI scanners. Dear turned the sounds into a propulsive track called “Drop Science“. But artistic inspiration goes even deeper than that. Concert pianist Marie-Agathe Charpagne, who also happens to have a degree in materials science, has worked on a steel superalloy used inside the latest jet engines developed by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE Aviation and Safran Aircraft Engines.

Back To The Future

GIF credit: Chris New for GE Reports.

Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov never worked for GE, but it didn’t stop him from using the company as prism to imagine the future. Half a century ago, he  walked into the GE exhibition at the 1964 New York World’s Fair in Queens and declared that “the direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere more so than at the General Electric pavilion.” What he saw inspired him to imagine the world in 2014 in an essay for the New York Times. GE created its Progressland pavilion in partnership with Disney. In 1967, after the World’s Fair ended, it became “The Carousel of Progress” and moved to Disneyland. It then moved once again, to Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, where it remains today.

Scientists made a sheet of gold that’s a million times thinner than a fingernail and could be a boon to electronics and medicine, the U.S. got its first 100% solar-powered airport, and researchers in Maryland created an elaborate questionnaire designed to stump even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence. The future is bright in this week’s coolest scientific advances, even if the bots have some catching up to do.

Tiny Treasure

The two-atom-thick sheet of gold has a highly organized lattice structure, and was dubbed “gold nanoseaweed” by researchers because it appears green in water. Image credit: University of Leeds. Top image credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? At England’s University of Leeds, researchers created a form of gold that’s a million times thinner than a human fingernail. Just two atoms thick, it’s “the thinnest unsupported gold ever created” and, like the supermaterial graphene, is considered a two-dimensional material since it’s just a couple of atom layers sitting one atop the other.

Why does it matter? Gold nanoparticles already have a wide array of uses in electronics, medical devices and other fields; the new ultrathin material can serve similar purposes, but 10 times more efficiently, giving manufacturers more bang for their buck with an expensive precious metal. Leeds professor Stephen Evans, who oversaw the research, said, “Gold is a highly effective catalyst. Because the nanosheets are so thin, just about every gold atom plays a part in the catalysis. It means the process is highly efficient.” The material could also be used in medical diagnosis, water purification and — because the ultrathin sheets are flexible — electronics applications like bendable screens and electronic inks.

How does it work? The researchers took chloroauric acid, which contains gold, and applied a “confinement agent,” a chemical that encourages the formation of the gold into two-atom sheets. The sheets turn out in the shape of fronds, and appear green in water, so the researchers dubbed their creation “gold nanoseaweed.” The results are described further in Advanced Science.

Halting Cancer In Its Tracks

The technique worked particularly well on metastatic triple-negative breast cancer cells, which don’t respond to other treatments like hormone therapy. Image credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? Low-intensity electromagnetic fields might slow the spread of some breast cancers to other areas of the body, according to a new study by researchers at The Ohio State University.

Why does it matter? Cancer is, basically, abnormal cell growth that makes its way through the body — that’s one reason it’s so dangerous. “A cancer cell has a tendency to do the most destructive thing imaginable,” said OSU engineering professor Jonathan Song, co-author of a new study in Communications Biology. “One very destructive thing these cells do is migrate to distant areas of the body. And what we learned here is that it seems by treating them with a certain class of electric field we are altering their potential to spread somehow.”

How does it work? The electromagnetic fields worked by “preventing the formation of long, thin extensions at the edge of a migrating cancer cell,” according to an OSU press release. The researchers built a device called a Helmholtz coil to apply the energy uniformly and found that it particularly repelled the spread of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer cells — a kind that otherwise doesn’t tend to respond to treatments like hormone therapy. This is just an initial step: Song and his colleagues only tested the technique on cells in a lab. “But what we showed, biologically, is that these cancer cells are becoming profoundly less metastatic, which is a very important finding,” he said.

Solar Airfield

The Chattanooga airport is the first in the U.S. to run on 100% solar power. Image credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? This summer Tennessee’s Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport became the first airport in the U.S. to generate enough solar power to completely meet its energy needs.

Why does it matter? Airports consume a tremendous amount of energy — you know, all those people waiting around charging their phones — so going solar has obvious environmental benefits. The project also demonstrates the growing ability of technology to store energy generated by solar for use hours later, after the sun goes down; at Chattanooga it’s kept in two 250-kilowatt batteries, according to Energy News Network. The city’s manager of smart grid development, Jim Glass, said, “Energy storage is going to really take off in the next several years as costs continue to drop. We’re trying to learn as much as we can now so that when it becomes cost-effective we’ll have a good idea of what we want to do and what kind of technology we want to use.”

How does it work? The three-phase project to install the solar farm kicked off in 2010 and wrapped up this summer with the completion of the 2.64-megawatt array, located just next to the airfield, which produces enough electricity to power 160,000 light bulbs. Interested parties may keep up with the farm’s production online, at a page that tracks how much juice the panels are generating moment by moment. So far, the farm has generated energy equal to 1.3 million gallons of gas.

Out-thinking Artificial Intelligence

What is it? Researchers at the University of Maryland have created 1,213 questions designed to stump artificial intelligence programs— just to remind the bots who’s in charge.

Why does it matter? Just kidding! It’s actually to make the bots even savvier for whenever they decide to rise up against us. The project stems from a typical AI problem: Computers can store incredible amounts of information and ably answer many questions, but they have some trouble with nuance and can be tripped up by linguistic challenges humans have no trouble with — like paraphrasing, or distracting or unexpected elements. Regarding the tough questions, as a news release from UMD put it, “The system that learns to master these questions will have a better understanding of language than any system currently in existence.” I don’t see what could go wrong, Dave.

How does it work? The project is also notable because the questions were designed jointly by humans and AI. People would write a question for computers to answer, and the computers would, in turn, highlight key words or phrases that helped them figure out the questions. Then the researchers swapped out those words or phrases for something harder. When the questions were tested in a tournament between human players and computers, even the “weakest” human teams won. The research team described its work further in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Homemade UFO

What is it? Maybe all those UFOs that Navy pilots keep spotting aren’t from some far-flung planet after all — maybe they’re just from Romania? In that country, anyway, a pair of tinkerers have just unveiled the prototype of a fully functional flying saucer.

Why does it matter? The result of two decades of work, the machine is the creation of engineer Razvan Sabie and aerodynamicist Iosif Taposu, who call it ADIFO — short for all-directional flying object. In his first interview with American media, Sabie told Vice that the machine is “natural born for supersonic flight” and could lead to aircraft with unique abilities to move effortlessly back and forth, up and down through the air. A guide that Sabie and Taposu put together about the craft says, “The only limit to maneuverability is the pilot’s imagination.”

 How does it work? Though the craft does closely resemble a flying saucer, the inspiration for its shape was actually “the back cross-section of a dolphin’s airfoil,” or flipper — it’s not the first time that animal’s anatomy has been studied by aerodynamicists. The craft uses four ducted fans for takeoff, landing and slow-speed maneuvering, and a pair of jet engines for horizontal thrust; another set of thrust nozzles allow it to rotate or move sideways in flight. The 4-foot prototype points the way forward, though there’s still a lot of work to do, as Vice notes: “At the moment, what they’ve made is a glorified quadcopter, albeit with features that current quadcopters don’t have.”

For the world’s largest facility of its kind, Reliance Industries’ oil refinery is surprisingly hard to find. Built on the vast alluvial plains surrounding Jamnagar, a town in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat, the refinery is flanked by thick mango groves, tree-lined private highways and a pristine company town called Reliance Greens that holds homes, parks, schools and other facilities for some 2,500 employees and their families. The massive industrial monument only slowly emerges from behind the green curtain.

Stretching over an area larger than half of Manhattan, the plant holds some 4,000 kilometers of pipes that crisscross the dun-colored ground like a giant cardiovascular system. The pipes connect a forest of spindly oil-processing towers to hulking storage tanks and other outsize equipment capable of processing more than a million barrels of crude each day.

These steel pipelines are the facility’s most critical component. Many of them are insulated with glass wool covered with aluminum sheet metal. When water seeps in between the seams — say, during a monsoon — it can trigger corrosion that eventually can cause the pipe to leak. Such failures, which can cost refineries significantly in terms of downtime and repairs, could be avoided if only service crews could catch the corrosion early. “It doesn’t follow a pattern,” says Reliance’s Anand Haridas, who runs the unit at the refinery responsible for hunting down corroded pipes and replacing them. “Everybody in the industry is having this challenge, and there is constant endeavor to improve the way they detect corrosion.”

That’s why Manoharan Venugopal, senior engineer at GE’s India Technology Center — located some 800 miles southeast in the country’s tech hub, Bangalore — has been making a pilgrimage here since 2012. He and his team developed a suite of software and sensors that allows engineers like Haridas to keep better tabs on their pipes.

The team has installed 20 sensors to monitor 2.5 kilometers of pipes at the refinery, and has recently received permission from Reliance to increase the test project to 50 sensors. The design allows the GE team to detect water in the insulation and direct maintenance crews to spots the technology deems most likely to corrode. “Today the state of the art of detection is statistics,” Venugopal says. “Refineries estimate the probability of corrosion in the system and replace as much as a quarter of their pipes every year. We think we could be more surgical.”

Above: Manoharan Venugopal and his team developed a suite of software and sensors that allows Reliance Industries to keep better tabs on their pipes. Top: The refinery, stretching over an area larger than half of Manhattan, is flanked by thick mango groves, tree-lined private highways and a pristine company town called Reliance Greens that holds homes, parks, schools and other facilities for some 2,500 employees and their families. Images credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

The solution is one of many new GE technologies that mix the company’s knowledge of engineering with software and data analytics. “When we cut ourselves, the brain immediately knows it because of the network of nerves connecting every part of our body to the brain,” says Vinay Jammu, technical leader for software and analytics at the GE Bangalore center. “We are trying to develop something similar for machines.”

The work is also a good illustration of how scientists at GE Global Research collaborate with customers from the private sector as well as the government to bring new ideas to market. “We are helping them solve their biggest problems,” says Alok Nanda, CEO of the India Technology Center. “The advantage is that we get the freedom to run experiments on the actual equipment. We now have technicians on the ground in Jamnagar who collect measurements from the test site every day. It’s almost like our extended lab.”

Venugopal is an expert in nondestructive testing, which involves using X-ray and other imaging technologies typically used in healthcare to inspect industrial parts. In 2012, when he was looking for new applications for these technologies, he decided to call a maintenance manager he knew at Reliance and ask him about the biggest challenges he faced. Pipes were at the top of his list.

The refinery invited Venugopal for a visit, and he spent 15 days walking around the site, talking to engineers and maintenance crews and taking copious notes. “I thought that some of my engineering training would be applicable to their problem,” he says. “I wrote everything up in a report and sent it to them.”

His Reliance contact liked the work, and a few weeks later Venugopal received an email asking him to come back and present his pipe-monitoring idea to other managers. Soon Venugopal and his team started making the five-hour plane trip from Bangalore to Jamnagar’s tiny airport every few months to deploy and test their system. Cloaked in full-body suits, helmets, goggles and other safety gear, they’d head out into the blazing sun to install various iterations of sensors on the pipes, take measurements and analyze the data. “It was so hot and there was no shade, but nobody complained,” Venugopal says. “Everyone was so passionate about the project.”

The team has installed 20 sensors to monitor 2.5 kilometers of pipes at the Jamangar refinery, the world’s largest, and has recently received permission from Reliance to increase the test project to 50 sensors. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.

For the first three years, work progressed in fits and starts as the team labored to build the right sensors and eliminate noise from their signals. They had to filter out strange echoes generated by mesh wire holding the glass wool in place, for example, and resolve spikes in the signal caused by metal struts holding the pipes above the ground. The project picked up speed in 2015, when Reliance asked GE to install 20 sensors on its pipes, which include both straight segments and tricky elbows whose twists and bends are more prone to corrosion.

Last summer, a pair of GE service engineers based at the refinery visited two sensor sites and took measurements. Donning color-coded protective gear — safety is a top priority at the refinery, and all visitors must pass a multiple-choice safety test before they’re allowed on the premises — they carried a silver, rectangular explosion-proof briefcase holding a vector network analyzer, a device that generates and decodes the microwave signal traveling through the insulation. They also had a coil of black coaxial cable that connected the hardware to the sensors on the pipe.

The microwave pulse travels for 30 meters through the insulation in each direction from the sensor to an antenna, which reflects it back in a predictable way unless it runs into something that’s not supposed to be there, like water. The engineers upload the information to a portable data storage via a USB cable. “If we see water constantly for a period of time in a certain location, we alert the maintenance team,” Venugopal says. “They can go to the location and take the water out to prevent corrosion.”

This daily routine sounds simple, but the team is constantly working on improving its algorithms. Ultimately, it wants to collect enough high-quality data to develop a digital twin of the pipes — a virtual representation of the network that will allow it not only to pinpoint locations of likely corrosion, but also to model the actual thickness of the pipes. “In the future, we could have a living, 3D model of the most critical 100 kilometers of the pipes,” says Debasish Mishra, technology manager at the Bangalore center.

That model would combine external data with information about the liquids flowing through the pipes, plus maintenance and meteorological information from past inspections. “We will be able to start tracking and learning,” Debasish says. “We will be able to see that every time we have a severe monsoon coming from the northeast, we get more water ingestion points in certain areas.”

Reliance has funded more tests. Haridas said last year that the current probabilistic approach allowed his crew to detect corrosion in 30 to 40 percent of the areas they select to inspect. “We believe that with this new technology in place, we can push positive detection to 60 or 70 percent. But we still have a long way to go. In the long run, I don’t want to look for water — I want to look for corrosion.”

It’s an ever-shrinking world. Thanks to mobile technology, entire libraries’ worth of information fit snugly in our hands. We can shop, bank and work an eight-hour shift without leaving our homes. We attend lectures and hold meetings remotely, and visit with loved ones in distant countries. Never has life for much of the population been more convenient, or more physically confined.

If you don’t look up from time to time, you might miss something big. And in the case of GE technology, that can mean really big. Jet engines that dwarf professional basketball players, wind turbines that churn air high above the raging seas — innovations with a giant footprint, and a giant impact on how industry operates.

So, for a moment, don’t sweat the small stuff. Instead, gawk along with us at these massive feats of engineering.

Long Story Short

Above: Tulips aren’t the only thing growing from the Dutch soil. It’s also where GE planted a prototype of the Haliade-X 12MW, the world’s largest and most powerful offshore wind turbine, whose blades — seen here — are built to withstand gusting winds and stormy seas. Top: Roughly as big as a midsize New York City skyscraper, the mighty Cypress is GE Renewable Energy’s largest onshore wind turbine. Images credit: GE Renewable Energy.

When it comes to wind turbine blades, size matters. That’s because the longer the rotor diameter of a wind turbine, the more wind it can catch, and the more wind it can catch, the more energy it can produce. Consider GE’s Haliade-X 12MW wind turbine, currently being installed in Holland. It is the world’s largest and most powerful offshore wind turbine, looming 260 meters tall from base to blade tips — 1 meter taller than New York’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza tower. And the three blades that form this behemoth’s 220-meter rotor are themselves giants. Engineered by GE’s LM Wind Power to withstand the brutal gusts of the sea and made from thin layers of glass and carbon fibers, and balsa wood fused together with a special resin, they stretch 107 meters — longer than a football field and equivalent to 1.4 times the length of a Boeing 747. Put another way, if world-record-holding runner Usain Bolt ran from one end of the blade to the other, it would take him close to 10 seconds.

Tower Of Onshore Power

It may be big, but it travels well: GE Renewable Energy’s largest onshore wind turbine, the Cypress boasts blades that ship in pieces, for easier assembly on-site. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy.

Speaking of wind turbines, check out this bad boy. The mighty Cypress is GE Renewable Energy’s largest onshore wind turbine. With a tower that soars up to 161 meters into the air, or roughly as tall as a medium-size New York skyscraper, it’s capable of generating enough electricity to power 5,000 European homes, thanks to a 158-meter rotor. What’s remarkable about this rotor (other than its enormity) is its blades, which ship in two ready-to-assemble pieces. This design achieves a one-two punch: capacity-boosting length and ease of transport. For example, trucks can haul them through twisting roads in hilly terrain where building wind turbines might be logistically impractical, if not impossible. That means more green electrons powering more places, including Turkey, where renewable-energy operator Borusan EnBW Enerji recently announced an order for 27 Cypress models, which will provide enough capacity to power the equivalent of 190,000 homes.

On Another Plane

The whole GE9X engine is as wide as the entire body of a Boeing 737. Image credit: GE Aviation.

It takes a lot of oomph to hoist a wide-body passenger plane into the air. The oomphiest oompher of them all is the GE9X jet engine, designed to power the new Boeing 777x aircraft. It recently set a Guinness World Records title for thrust to become the most powerful commercial aircraft jet engine after reaching 134,300 pounds.

The fan alone on this powerhouse measures about 11 feet in diameter, big enough (if one were so inclined) to comfortably fit former basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal inside with his Lakers teammate Kobe Bryant sitting on his shoulders. The GE9X is big on efficiency, too. Built from lightweight carbon fiber composites and heat-resistant ceramic matrix composites, it’s 10% more fuel-efficient than its predecessor, the GE90.

After a career spent inventing new ways to manipulate metal, William Carter sometimes imagines what it would be like to demonstrate GE’s latest technology to a blacksmith visiting from the Bronze Age. While the time-traveling metallurgist would have no trouble recognizing the wax patterns and ceramic molds used to cast turbine blades and other large metal items, Carter says, he chuckles at the idea of his visitor watching computer-guided lasers conjure elaborate objects from a bed of metal powder: “What it would look like to him is as though we are making parts from burning dirt.”

Carter, an engineer at GE Research with 45 U.S. patents and 75 technical publications, has been around since the dawn of direct metal laser melting, a particularly promising subset of the field now known as additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. His time-travel musings reflect both his humility and his optimism, given the head start his upstart technology must overcome. “Investment casting has undergone 5,000 years of development,” Carter says, referring to the days when artisans used beeswax models to cast jewelry, ornaments, weapons and tools. “Additive manufacturing is now only about 30 to 40 years old. We’ve got to catch up fast.”

Today’s technology traces its earliest roots to the mid-1980s, when an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin named Carl Deckard ran the first experiments attempting to use a laser to build simple structures out of a plastic powder.

Deckard’s equipment was crude. Using a Commodore 64 computer, he would take early computer-aided design blueprints and use them to create a path for a laser, which would then build a small object by fusing bits of plastic together. (All additive manufacturing works this way, adding small layers of material together to create a solid object.) Deckard’s innovative process, known as selective laser sintering, caught the eye of William Carter, then a freshly minted Ph.D. working at GE Research.

Top image:  William Carter (right) and is collaborator Marshall Jones standing next to a 3D-printed combustor. Their latest printer prototype can 3D-print from metal parts as large as 1 meter in diameter and 1 meter tall. Contrast that with their first machine, which fit on a table and printed samples 3x1x1 inches. Top image credit: GE Research. Above: William Carter.

Soon it would capture Carter’s imagination as well. He teamed up with Marshall Jones, a fellow GE Research engineer and laser expert bound for the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and pitched his boss on a bold idea: Why not take the concept pioneered by Deckard using plastic and instead try to make objects out of metal?

Using additive manufacturing to make metal parts soon produced very high-quality prototypes, to the delight of Carter and Jones, but also revealed a fundamental problem. The laser fusing the metal powder into a solid object focused on such a fine point — typically around a tenth of a millimeter — that it took ages for the beam to create even small objects. “The process was painfully slow,” Carter says. “But I saw it as a huge opportunity.”

After writing a paper on their early experiments, Jones focused on lasers and Carter returned to other research on metals processing. Developments continued in the industry, and by the mid-2010s, many other engineers and executives had become believers in the potential of the new technology. GE responded by making a series of deals, including partnerships, acquisitions and other investments, to stay at the vanguard.

Carter had never shaken the 3D-printing bug, and soon returned to the technology, using it to build a series of larger and larger parts at faster and faster speeds. One recent success came in the building of combustor liners for jet engines. Combustor liners are heavily perforated parts that control the flow of cooling air into the hottest sections of the engine. The new additive process made it possible to redesign the perforations as complex tunnels that route the air through the metal to spots engineers had trouble reaching, and opens up a new world of performance and efficiency gains.

GE’s Aviation, Power and Healthcare businesses are using 3D printing. In aviation, engineers used the technology, also known as additive manufacturing, to distill into just 12 printed parts what typically would amount to 800 components if they were made by conventional methods. Image credit: Chris New for GE Reports @seechrisnew.

Carter’s current project, a collaboration between GE Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, began in early 2015. With funding from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the project created open-source software to control 3D printers, giving researchers greater control over the metal-melting process than they could get with commercial software.

Carter is now working on the final phase of the collaboration, building a working system that aims to speed up the printing process once again. Increases in speed typically come from three sources: using more lasers, using more powerful beams to melt thicker metal layers faster, or tweaking the process to find more efficient paths for the lasers that already exist.

Unfortunately, the easiest solutions come with new problems of their own. Carter explains it this way: “If you’re watering your lawn nicely, and then you switch to a fire hose, you get a different result. That same thing happens with lasers, if you just switch to higher power.”

To handle that problem, Carter has teamed up with Livermore’s Manyalibo “Ibo” Matthews, who has been using a camera running at up to 10 million frames per second to show what happens when the laser hits the “melt pool” where the metal particles fuse together.

As a huge amount of power focuses on the tiny spot, atoms of metal fly off in a tiny jet stream, which in turn heats the adjacent gas and draws in metal powder that then spatters the area. Spatter causes problems when it deposits metal particles in the laser’s path. Those bits of metal can be big enough to cast a shadow that prevents the laser from welding the spot beneath it.

Carter cheerfully admits that while the cameras have provided an understanding of the problem, that insight has yet to lead to a solution. Still, even without a fix in hand, he is confident that one will present itself eventually.

Looking back to his earliest experiments in the early 1990s, he recalls a similar feeling. “At the time we really did think: ‘All we need to do is increase the build rate.’ The process rate had to increase by about two orders of magnitude — you need to go about 100 times faster — and that’s what’s happened over those years.”

Healthcare isn’t typically the first field that leaps to mind when you hear 3D printing, artificial intelligence or virtual reality. But all three technologies are in fact making inroads into the field. They’re allowing doctors to free up their schedules and dedicate more of their time to patients — and improve the quality of care delivered. GE Reports recently talked to Adeline Digard, GE Healthcare’s director of digital product management in France, who has been looking closely at the technologies and applications developed by GE Healthcare’s Advanced Visualization teams in Buc, near Paris.

GE Reports: What are you hoping to accomplish with these three technologies?

Adeline Digard: We want to simplify and improve the workflow for our customers by automating it as much as possible — to make them more efficient and better able to focus on treating their patients.

Take 3D printing, for example. What patients and doctors both want is a quick and accurate diagnosis. Doctors also want to educate their patients, explain their conditions and how they will be treated. Here is how it works: A patient comes in and is scanned. The images are then processed by our software to highlight anatomical structures and lesions. We have developed a suite of high-performance analysis tools which automate routine tasks for radiologists, such as automatically detecting vessels and bones, and spotting and measuring lesions, as well as labeling the vertebrae.

It also allows instant disease comparison so doctors can see how lesions spread or shrink on a patient over time. Areas of interest can be color-coded for further exploration or attention. Then the physician can print out a 3D model so they can see it for themselves — and show the patient.

Above and top image: A patient is scanned. The images are then processed by GE’s software to highlight anatomical structures and lesions. It is then printed as a 3D model to show the physician — and patient — so they can see the issues as they grow or shrink over time. Image credits: GE Healthcare. 

GER: Why do they care?

AD: This advanced visualization software allows for easy segmentation, so you can pick a very specific piece of anatomy to be transformed into a mesh — a three-dimensional rendering on the computer. Until now, it was very difficult to select a heart, vessel or piece of the spine and then print it. But now you can do just the coronary artery, or two of the four chambers of the heart, or whatever it is the physician needs. Doctors can select what they need and send it to a 3D printer, which prints it right on-site. It offers a way to gain a better understanding of the impact of the disease on the heart, for example.

It also helps during discussions with the patient, so that they can be fully informed about their disease and better participate in treatment decisions. It can also help the surgeon visualize various solutions, so they can pick the one that’s best in each individual case. And even allow them to practice directly on the printed model in cases of complex surgery.

GER: What are you working on now in virtual reality?

AD: We have partnered with two surgeons and provided them with prototypes of our VR system. The idea is to let them play around with this equipment in a clinical situation so they can determine which kind of clinical cases can get the most benefit from VR, and how it can be used to improve the outcomes of their patients.

The first surgeon is focusing on heart disease, specifically the mitral valve, which is located in the heart between the two ventricles. We think VR can be useful here since a failed or failing mitral valve can be replaced, but it’s tricky. Sometimes it’s not easy to see the mitral valve correctly, because of human anatomy. It’s easier to find the mitral valve with VR than looking on that flat monitor. After surgery, one of the side effects can be the valve leaking or failing, and again, because you can move all around and look from every angle, it’s easier to identify the problem.

The second one is a thoracic surgeon who is using the prototype to see how the ability to use virtual reality would have changed the way he treated his patients. Maybe he could use it to cut back on unpleasant side effects, such as excess skin removal, or reduce time in surgery because he is able to prepare better or work more efficiently. He’s selected some critical cases and, in a double-blind review with another physician, they are looking to see if the surgery approach would have been different if they had been able to use virtual reality prior to it.

Two surgeons have partnered with GE Healthcare’s Advanced Visualization teams to test drive its VR system. The goal is to have better patient outcomes and see how this system can be implemented into each surgery’s workflow. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

GER: How about artificial intelligence? What’s happening there?

AD: Let’s start with a simple example, one where AI improves the daily workflow and makes doctors more efficient. Say we want to make it easier and faster to identify problems with the vertebrae. To do that, we need to build a robust algorithm that can sift through the image data and automatically display the relevant information for the diagnosis. We start by teaching it what “normal” is — so eventually it can search for and identify abnormal. That means feeding the algorithm with the widest number of cases possible to teach it to identify all the vertebrae.

When it can, we bump it up a notch, this time adding a pathology, such as scoliosis. We keep adding more cases to “teach” all kinds of anatomies and conditions until we’ve built this massive database that the algorithm accesses. So when we’re finished, we have an algorithm that’s been trained on an extraordinarily large and complicated database, and 95% of the time, despite however many complexities, it can still visualize the vertebrae correctly from neck to bottom. That’s called deep learning.

With deep learning, this advanced visualization software can use an algorithm on a massive database and 95% of the time, despite however many complexities, it can still visualize the vertebrae correctly from neck to bottom. Image credit: GE Healthcare. 

When it’s put to use in a clinical setting ­— say, helping a radiologist reading a CT scanner — it could save a great deal of time. The machine has already reviewed every orientation of the spine and run through every permutation — much faster than the physician can — and alerted the physician to any abnormalities it’s identified. The AI also automates routine parts of a radiologist’s report. For example, it automatically notes the location and orientation of each image, so the radiologist can skip that vital but tedious part of the report. It can also handle tasks like numbering and describing each vertebra in the lumbar region of a lower back scan.

It could save the radiologist an enormous amount of time for the software to take care of those universal things. That is, in fact, the entire point of AI — to allow physicians to focus their attention on what is critical for their patients, not spend time on the tedious tasks.