By Mark Egan

Texan Frank “Frankie” Wilson Sr.’s ties to his employer, Gaumer Process, run deep.

Wilson, 60, recalls he started out making parts for Gaumer, a Houston-based supplier of heating equipment to GE power plants, at his father’s machine shop. Later, after working for three years at GE, Wilson landed his first job at Gaumer as a welder. Now, 18 years on, Wilson drives a Gaumer truck, a job he loves. Meanwhile, four of his close relatives and many of his friends also depend on the firm for their livelihood. “To my family,” Wilson says, “Gaumer means everything.”

Wilson doesn’t usually fret over the workings of the international financial system but these days, he’s concerned about a fight over the fate of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. The American credit agency guarantees loans to foreign companies that purchase U.S. products, and it is in danger of losing its charter on June 30.

If the U.S. Congress fails to renew the 80-year-old Ex-Im Bank’s charter, Gaumer will be forced to cut 60 of 150 jobs, say managers there. Thousands of small U.S. companies contracted to build equipment for GE and other export giants will face the same pressures.

A finished Gaumer Process 3-Zone Hot Oil Circulation system, loaded on a truck ready to be shipped to Canada.

The Wilson family could be hit hard. Frankie’s brother David and his son Frankie Jr. work in quality control. His wife, Guenseslada, is an executive assistant. His son-in-law Peter Stewart is an electrical foreman. So the Wilsons and their co-workers are watching the debate over the Ex-Im Bank closely. “For us, it affects so many lives, from my family to my grandchildren,” Frankie Wilson says. “Gaumer is our livelihood. We depend on it to pay the bills.”

Though Ex-Im is called a “bank,” it’s no ordinary lender. Instead, it plays a key helper role. Say a big overseas utility borrows money to purchase a GE power-plant system with gear from various suppliers like Gaumer. The overseas utility needs to reassure its lenders that they will be covered when the collateral for the loan (shiploads of valuable GE gear) is traveling over international waters. So the utility turns to the Ex-Im Bank, which—for a fee—guarantees the loan.

Opponents of Ex-Im insist that the private sector should be able to cover this sort of lending, and that Ex-Im shifts risk from corporations to taxpayers. However, dozens of countries around the world—including developing markets that are hungry for the power and healthcare equipment GE and companies like Gaumer team up to provide—require the backing of a government bank, not a private one, for large-scale infrastructure projects. Without a U.S. Export-Import Bank, those deals would go to companies from the 60 other countries in the world with their own Ex-Ims.

This would have real consequences for families like the Wilsons. Though Houston-based Gaumer is not a household name, the electric process heaters and engineered systems it makes for power plants and refineries and for the petrochemical and gas industries have been shipped worldwide. Gaumer corporate controller Patrick Patel says it’s a special company. “We are literally what made America great—a hard-core, sophisticated mechanical engineering firm working in a field where many countries simply cannot compete,” Patel says.

The Ex-Im Bank supported 164,000 American jobs last year and 1.3 million in the last six years, buoying an American manufacturing sector that employs 17 million people. At Gaumer alone, Patel says $10 million of Gaumer’s $35 million annual revenues depend on Ex-Im support—meaning if the bank loses its mandate, jobs will be cut.

“Losing those jobs will be devastating, but what is worse is that manufacturing skills are already dying in the United States,” he said. “The best technicians will be laid off and they will never teach the next generation the techniques of manufacturing.”

“Our life depends on this,” Patel said.

To learn more about the U.S. Export-Import Bank and why it matters to U.S. businesses, please visit http://exportersforexim.org/.

By Tomas Kellner

For GE and CFM International, GE’s joint company with France’s Snecma (Safran), the Paris Air Show was primarily about selling the latest jet engines like the LEAP, the GEnx, and the GE9X. But that doesn’t mean the company didn’t have other technology around.

GE Aviation, the GE business unit focused on everything connected to flight, makes digital navigation systems, avionics, aircraft components from advanced composite materials, and even power management systems that supply electricity to seat-back entertainment. Take a look:

CFM has been making jet engines for 40 years, including the CF34 (top image), as well as the next-generation LEAP engine with 3D-printed parts and ceramic composites (above). Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

In 1941, GE made the very first American jet engine for the U.S. military, and the company has been powering fighter jets ever since, including this F-16 that flew to Paris from Aviano, Italy. The engine inside is the F-110. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

GE is developing a massive new engine called the GE9X for Boeing’s new 777X wide-body jet. The 11-foot engine will be 10 percent more fuel efficient than the GE90 engine currently used by 777 aircraft. GE Aviation’s Rick Kennedy explains the next-generation technologies that will go inside the engine.

Workers in Hamble, UK, are making the fixed wing trailing edge for the Airbus A350 XWB, “one of the most complex, highly loaded parts of the wing that requires utmost precision and mastery in the assembly process, as well as in the design and stress calculation,” says Mike Bausor, Airbus marketing director for the A350 XWB plane.

The flight deck of the Gulfstream G650 ER. This business jet can travel just under the speed of sound, or 0.925 Mach. The plane is using avionics and a digital aircraft monitoring system from GE Aviation.Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

This submarine-hunting Boeing P-8 Poseidon is powered by a pair of CFM56 engines. The Black Hawk helicopter in the background is also using GE technology, a pair of T700 engines. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

The A10 Thunderbolt II may be called “Warthog,” but the tank-fighting jet has been a workhorse of the U.S. military and National Guard since the 1970s. The plane is powered by a pair of GE’s TF34 engines. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

The GE90 engine powering this China Airlines Boeing 777 is currently the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

This Qatar Airways Airbus A380 is using a quartet of GP7200 engines made by Engine Alliance, a joint-venture between GE and Pratt & Whitney. The core of the GP7200 comes from the GE90. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

A GEnx engine on a Qatar Airways Dreamliner at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

By Tomas Kellner

Starting a century ago, the first airshows were essentially a flying circus: roving bands of pilots and daredevils moving like a flock of birds from village to village and performing stunts like wing walking and other airborne acrobatics. (They may have coined the word “barnstorming,” though it remains unclear whether they actually flew through open barns.)

Today, some of that spectacle still remains, but airshows, especially the big ones in Paris, Farnborough, and Dubai, have become huge business, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in new deals every year.

“It’s not only the size of the shows that dwarfs the flying circuses, but also the size of the technology,” Senatori says. “That size is even more awesome if you keep in mind that we’ve been flying for a little more than a century.” Above: The massive GP7200 jet engine powering the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane. Top GIF: Bi-planes performed stunts at the Paris Air Show. Image and GIF credits: GE Reports/Adam Senatori. 

Adam Senatori, who used to fly regional jets for Northwest airlines and still holds a pilot’s license, has been photographing and filming airshows for the last five years. “I’ve been always amazed by the feats of the barnstormers and when you see the fighter jet flyovers here, you still get the same thrill,” Senatori says. “But today, these shows are where the business gets done and where you see the technology that everyone’s going to be flying in the near future.”

He prepared a visual essay about the latest airshow in Paris, which is taking place this week. Take a look.

This is how Senatori sees the GE90, the world’s most powerful jet engine.

By Tomas Kellner

The Paris Air Show will stay open to the public over the weekend, but the business part is over. GE and CFM International, GE’s joint company with France’s Snecma (Safran), reported a combined total of $19 billion in new business.

GE received orders valued at $5.4 billion, including orders for its new GE9X engine, which is currently in development. Testing on the engine is scheduled to begin next year.

Top: The LEAP engine during testing. Image credit: CFM International Above: A GEnx engine on a new Vietnam Airlines Dreamliner. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

CFM signed $14 billion in new deals for its latest LEAP family of engines, as well as the CFM56 model, which powers single-aisle jets, including many Boeing 737. The deals include orders, commitments and long-term service agreements.

To date, CFM has received orders for 9,550 LEAPs valued at $134 billion (list price).

“What a great show,” said Jean-Paul Ebanga, CFM president and CEO. “In just three days, we more than doubled our total orders for this year.”

GE Aviation’s Rick Kennedy explains GE’s new GE9X engine.

By Terrence Murray

She’s a massive beast that can generate up to 600 megawatts of electricity in a combined cycle power plant, the equivalent power that would be needed to supply approximately 600,000 U.S. homes. To do so efficiently, however, this latest GE gas turbine, officially called 9HA but nicknamed Harriet by GE workers, must withstand temperatures greater than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

But here’s the rub: over the long term, the high heat also causes wear and tear inside the turbine that is impossible to see. Impossible, that is, without a virtual model of the turbine operating at full capacity.

Cascade is using powerful software to model turbulent combustion. The program allows the company to monitor and track pollutants like CO, CO2 and NOx. GIF credits: Cascade Technologies

That’s why GE started working with Cascade Technologies, maker of powerful simulation software, to study complex fluid and heat flows inside big machines like gas turbines. The partnership with Cascade, a spin-off from the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University, will give GE engineers a virtual peek inside Harriet, the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine, and help them build even more efficient machines in the future.

Frank Ham, Cascade president and CEO, says that the software is the equivalent of a “modern-day digital microscope.”

“Seeing details they were not aware of helps engineers better understand why gas turbine designs work the way they do, and GE gains critical knowledge as to how they can improve them,” Ham says.

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

With all of that data, Cascade can produce powerful simulations of a number of scenarios, including the multiple step combustion process inside a turbine. The code is so detailed that it replicates this intricate system at the microsecond level.

All of that computing power should allow GE engineers to make changes and improvements to new turbine designs up to ten times faster over the course of a typical two-year product development process. That means more robust, efficient and cleaner turbines, delivered faster, according to John Lammas, vice president of power generation engineering at GE Power & Water.

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

By Mike Keller

There were many next-generation planes at the Paris Air Show last week, but the one that was missing was the supersonic passenger jet. Still, the once and future dream of traveling from New York to L.A. in less than three hours  is now getting a shot in the arm thanks to a new round of NASA funding.

Last week, the agency said it was putting $2.3 million into eight projects to overcome barriers to commercial supersonic flight. The announcement comes more than a decade after the Concorde completed the world’s last flight that carried paying customers two times faster than the speed of sound.

The goal of the new work is to make supersonic flight greener by reducing high-altitude emissions and to cut down on the noise from sonic booms, the extremely loud report from a shockwave created by an aircraft flying faster than 660 mph, the speed of sound at aircraft cruising altitude.

In 1947, the Bell X-1B rocket plane piloted by Chuck Yeager accelerated to 700 mph, or 1.06 Mach, and became the first aircraft to cross the sound barrier. The plane, which was powered by a rocket engine, was drop-launched from Superfortress bombers. Image credit: NASA

Sonic booms are considered such a potential public nuisance that the Federal Aviation Administration has banned civilian supersonic aircraft flights over land since 1973. The agency is now looking at changing this rule with research like that being funded by NASA, which shows that noise from booms can be significantly reduced.

“Lessening sonic booms…is the most significant hurdle to reintroducing commercial supersonic flight,” said Peter Coen, head of the High Speed Project in NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. “Other barriers include high-altitude emissions, fuel efficiency and community noise around airports.”

Concorde (above), developed by France and Britain, and Russia’s Tupolev TU-144 (below) were the first two supersonic commercial planes. Both planes were retired, but NASA used the Russian plane to study supersonic passenger transport. Image credits: Aero Icarus and NASA

Universities and companies are splitting the funding to work on projects like developing quieter nozzles, pilot interfaces to reduce the impact of supersonic overland flight, and studies of the environmental impact that supersonic flight  might have on the stratosphere. Organizations like MIT, GE and the University of California are being funded to conduct research and development over the course of one to four years.

At GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, N.Y., experts in acoustic, aerodynamic, fluidic and combustion technologies will focus on reducing supersonic jet engine noise during takeoffs and landings. Engineers say the noise coming from high-speed aircraft, even at the lower speeds they will be traveling during takeoff and landing, is a significant challenge that needs to be addressed. NASA awarded the company $599,000 for a two-year study period.

In the 1950s, Gerhard Neumann (left) and Neil Burgess developed the J79 engine, GE’s first supersonic jet engine that could travel as fast as twice the speed of sound. They hit on a breakthrough design that allowed them to modulate the amount of air coming inside the engine from the compressor. Today, the same technology is helping GE build more efficient jet engines and also gas turbines.

“GE has developed extensive high-fidelity simulation tools and design concepts for noise reduction in our commercial and military engines, and we now plan to leverage that technology to reduce propulsion noise for this application,” said Kishore Ramakrishnan, principal investigator on the NASA program and member of the Aerodynamics and Acoustics Lab at GE Global Research. “We also are teaming with Lockheed Martin to understand the impact of these concepts on overall aircraft performance and sonic boom characteristics.”

This image illustrates the density of a jet engine exhaust flow. GE engineers are using powerful supercomputers to study jet engines, increase their performance and reduce noise. The image was created on the Intrepid computer network at Argonne National Lab. Image credit: GE Global Research

Ramakrishnan says the company’s research will look to better fit the engine into the aircraft’s overall design to minimize noise. Engineers will also evaluate technologies that can reduce fan and jet noise coming from the engine itself. Part of that investigation will include producing advanced simulations that model the noisy high-velocity flow coming out of the engine’s exhaust nozzle, as well as noise from the fan radiating out through the inlet of the engine.

Company officials say these types of government-funded project are important to advance aviation into its next generation, where supersonic travel could become available to a wider swath of society.

This picture is a two-dimensional cut-away from the previous photo. Image credit: GE Global Research

“It’s truly amazing how far air travel has come over the past century,” said Narendra Joshi, Advanced Technology Program Leader for propulsion at GE Global Research. “It has shrunk the world in ways we could not even have imagined 100 years ago. But we need to continue to push forward, and it is great that NASA is leading the way and supporting industry in developing the innovations that are needed to make economic supersonic air travel possible.”

By Tim Weber

Vittorio Michelassi is patient man, but even he doesn’t have enough time. As the chief engineer for aerodynamics at a GE Aviation research center, his job is to figure out “what’s really happening inside the jet engine,” and make engines more efficient.

The traditional approach, called computational fluid dynamics (CFD), “may take 10 million hours of computer time, and involve many terabytes of data,” Michelassi says. “The number of unknowns in the simulation is in excess of billions.”

That’s why Michelassi and his team at GE Aviation’s Advanced Aviation Technology Center of Excellence (ATT) in Munich, Germany, recently started using a new approach called “high-fidelity CFD.” It allows them to get close to the “real physics” happening inside the burning guts of an engine by pooling the power of several supercomputers spread out across Europe and the U.S. Some of their simulations involve as many as 50,000 computer cores running in parallel.

These supercomputer simulations show how turbulent air swirls from turbine blades and trailing edges.Image credits: Vittorio Michelassi/GE Aviation

“It’s like running a ‘numerical test rig,’ where you reproduce the real behavior of a real engine, but you do it in a supercomputer… with an accuracy that you can never measure in a real rig,” Michelassi says.

The ATT is working closely with engineers based at GE Global Research labs (GRC) in Munich, but also universities around the world to better understand turbulence inside jet engines and figure out what it means for performance and durability. (GRC scientists are separately using supercomputers to study jet engine noise, and GE Power and Water is modeling heat flows.) 

“We are looking for the smoking gun and find where the inefficiencies are,” Michelassi says. “Then we can fix it.”

Image credit: Vittorio Michelassi/GE Aviation

By Zack Lord

It looks like a UFO stuck on a giant utility pole, but the ecoROTR– or Energy Capture Optimization by Revolutionary Onboard Turbine Reshape – could light the way to bigger, better and more efficient wind turbines. “As far as I know, there’s nothing like this in the world,” says Mike Bowman, leader of sustainable energy projects at GE Global Research. “This could be a game changer.”

Early wind tunnel tests showed that using the dome-like structure to deflect wind from the unproductive center of the turbine could increase its efficiency by 3 percent. GE scientists are now testing the structure in the Mojave Desert in California.

GE Reports recently dispatched an Inspire 1 drone capable of shooting 4K video – essentially movie quality - to the location and Group SJR animated the footage with Superhoop’s Hoop interactive video technology. You can turn, toggle and explore the images below the headline by dragging your cursor or finger over them. (If you look closely, Bowman is one of the tiny specks standing in the shade of the dome on the nacelle of the turbine.) Take it for a spin.

GE researchers and technicians must strap on a safety harness and climb an aluminum ladder that’s nearly 300 feet long to reach the dome. Image credit: GE Reports

The aluminum dome weighs 20,000-pounds. Image credit: GE Reports

By Tomas Kellner

In 2012, Chicago-based pilot and photographer Adam Senatori won an Instagram photo contest sponsored by GE. The award was a first class trip to the GE Aviation’s plant in Wales and to London.

While he was there, he shot photos for GE’s Instagram account and also made animated GIFs of the assembly line at the facility. The work caught the eye of Katrina Craigwell, GE’s director of global content and programming, who started dispatching Senatori to document big airshows around the world.

Senatori, who just returned home from the 2015 Paris Air Show, gave GE Reports a guided tour of this exclusive world.

Senatori says that the light was perfect at last year’s Farnborough Air Show. Top image: The U.S. Navy’s submarine-hunting Boeing P-8 Poseidon is powered by a pair of CFM56 engines. Above: This Airbus A380 has four engines from Engine Alliance. GE is a partner in both CFM and EA. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

Tomas Kellner: What do you look for when you start shooting an airshow?

Adam Senatori: Efficiency is key. Global airshows are enormous, often covering acres of tarmac. Simply walking around all day with gear that can easily weigh 50 pounds is exhausting. It’s been incredibly beneficial to use years of airshow experience to my advantage and predict what will happen and when, and position myself for the best shot.

I start planning in the weeks prior to the show open. I’ll begin researching which aircraft are scheduled to attend and will build my shot list from that. Airshows are dynamic, vast events that are subject to random weather, changing schedules and of course the economy.

When I arrive at the show the very first thing I do is simply walk the grounds and assess the light and available angles I’ll have to work with for the week.

TK: Is there something specific you are looking for, some touch points you always try to hit?

AS: I always make a point to get images of rare aircraft that may be on static display or part of the flying display. Airshows usually involve military aircraft that simply are not publicly visible. A great example of this was the Sukhoi SU-35 (above) at the 2013 Paris Airshow.

Also, I focus on the leading technology that’s on display, like the GEnx jet engine. Airshows are often the only time to create images of brand new engines on factory-fresh aircraft. Everything is clean and pristine!

Although the Vietnam Airlines Dreamliner that dazzled the crowds in Paris flew there from Washington State, its GEnx engines were almost surgically clean. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

TK: What about the people who visit airshows? What is the crowd like? Do you try to capture them in your pictures?

AS: Yes, I try to capture the crowd, or at least the human element. A good example of this is the image I made at the Dubai Airshow in 2013 of a trade visitor standing behind a GEnx engine. It helps show the enormity of the technology (see above).

I prefer to shoot images of visitors interacting with the show, whether they are watching the flying display or checking out the aircraft on the ground.

Visitors to the Paris Air Show are waiting for afternoon flyovers to begin. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

The big airshows are also big business. GE and its partners won $19 billion in new engine orders and commitments in Paris this month. Boeing and Airbus pulled in a combined $107 billion. Above: Visitors posing in from of the world’s largest jet engine, the GE90, powering a China Airlines Boeing 777. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

TK: Of all the airshows you visited, do you have a favorite one?

AS: I love them all. Each event is a unique character.

From a shooting perspective though, Farnborough gets the edge for getting solid shots of aircraft flying because the clouds are always full of contrast, which provides a nice dramatic backdrop for the aircraft and I can get fairly close to the runway.

Dubai gets the award for making shots of aircraft on the tarmac, because the background is stark and clean.

Paris… well it’s a beautiful event, well run and let’s be honest, it’s the best city to visit!

Another day begins at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

A biplane flyover. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

A Rafale fighter jer flyover in Paris. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

An Airbus A350 at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

From this perspective it is hard to believe that as many as 280 passengers fit inside the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

The Vietnam Airlines Dreamliner is approaching the Paris Air Show, while a Turkish Airlines jet is taking off from the Charles De Gaulle Airport in the background. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

Airshow visitors in Dubai. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

Senatori inside the cockpit of a brand new Qatar Airways Airbus A380 at the Paris Air Show. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports

By Jermaine Dallas

Imagine this scenario: A gunshot echoes down a city street at night. Passerby turn to look, but can’t make out the scene in the darkness. The first to react effectively is the nearest street lamp. It hears the gun and automatically goes to full brightness to illuminate the scene, film the attacker and call the emergency services – all in an instant.

Or how about medical emergencies? An intelligent lighting system could be a central part of the healthcare infrastructure, serving as network through which hospital managers receive updates in real time about a patient’s location and status. It could significantly improve the quality of medical care and speed up response time.

These examples are much more real that you might imagine. Networked intelligent LED lighting systems (see above) equipped with sensors that can see, feel and hear could soon illuminate roads and hallways, and help improve security, optimize traffic, monitor the environment, and a whole lot more.

There are nearly 90 million streetlights in the U.S. and Europe. For the proponents of smart cities, that’s a lot of potential for lighting upgrades that could make lives easier and more enjoyable.

Still, against a background of austerity, many municipalities find it hard to justify an investment in something that seems a bit futuristic. But that investment could actually be part of the solution. “Smart is the antibiotic to austerity,” says Agostino Renna, president and CEO of GE Lighting Europe, Middle East & Africa.

How? Renna says it’s possible to invest in smart technologies in ways that make cities more profitable. “Many markets want to scale back,” Renna says. “You either have local governments that will cling to the status quo and butcher their organizations to deliver cost savings, or you have creative cities that embrace innovation.”

The latter would be Renna’s option. “LED technology becomes the enabling platform for cities to go smart,” Renna says. “It comes with a return on investment.” (See video below)

GE Lighting recently carried out research with the Carbon Trust, the UK-based organization that helps companies to become more energy efficient, and discussed the issues with British public sector decision-makers.

One thing the research made clear was that the greatest obstacles to rolling out smart technology had nothing to do with the technology itself. It is already out there in various forms.

The key goal now is to transform intelligent LED lighting into a platform on which developers can build their own applications. Once the platforms are rolled out across cities, the only constraint would be their creativity.

New “intelligent” LED streetlights combined with sensors and cloud analytics could soon start delivering real street smarts and savings. Image credit: GE Lighting

Renna says that GE Lighting is pushing for open innovation and open protocols, and his business has already started working with a number of app developers.

He’s not alone turned on by the technology.The Carbon Trust research found that of the public sectors executives polled, 57 percent have already started to roll out indoor and outdoor LED lighting, and 77 percent have implemented building efficiency measures to make their departments smarter and waste less energy.

For Renna, the future seems bright. “This is just the start,” he says.

By Thomas Millas

Everything is big in Texas, but when it comes to hospitals, the Texas Medical Center in Houston is the biggest in the world. Laid out over an area more than 50 percent larger than New York’s Central Park, this massive healthcare complex sees more than 7 million patients every year and its doctors complete nearly a 1,000 surgeries per day. “There’s no collection like this anywhere in the world,” says TMC’s President Robert C. Robbins.

But size hasn’t been Dr. Robbins’ only challenge. For years, big power plant owners and Texas community groups have been raising alarms about the possibility rolling blackouts, and urging the state to overhaul its power markets and add capacity to the grid.

TECO’s power plant at the Texas Medical Center shares jet engine technology with Air Force One. Image credit: GE Reports/GE Distributed Power.

In 2009, TMC and its partner, the Thermal Energy Corp. (TECO), decided to take matters in their own hands and use a seemingly unusual technology to generate backup electricity as well as heating and cooling for the hospital complex: a modified jet engine, the same kind that powers many Boeing 747s, including Air Force One.

The LM6000 gas turbine (top image) is built around GE’s CF6 jet engine. Four of them also power Air Force One. Image credit: U.S. Air Force

The bet has been paying off. TMC has had reliable air conditioning, heat and backup power for nearly five years now, and this week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded TECO its prestigious ENERGY STAR CHP Award.

The award is basically a seal of approval like the one you see on refrigerators and microwaves, only much larger. The ENERGY STAR CHP Award is given to combined heat and power projects that are the best of its kind in the United States. TECO took home the prize the first year it was eligible to compete.

The machine that TECO has been using since 2011 didn’t have to travel far. It was assembled at a plant just south of the city that belongs to GE’s Distributed Power business.

Because of their jet engine heritage, GE calls the machines “aeroderivative” gas turbines. The one working at TECO can generate 48 megawatts of electricity and also supply the hospital with steam and hot water to make sure the center stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. “We serve over 6,500 hospital beds,“ says Steve Swinson, president and CEO of TECO. “If we don’t do what we do, they don’t do what they do.”

GE engineers built the TECO’s LM6000 aeroderivative turbine around the CF6-80 jet engine, one of the world’s first high-bypass turbofan jet engines. 

The first GE high-bypass jet engine was originally developed to power the U.S. Air Force’s giant C-5 transport planes.

Just like a plane gunning its engines for takeoff, aeroderivative turbines can ramp up to full power in less than 10 minutes. This makes them handy during blackouts, when they need to quickly pickup slack, and also in the hot summer when everyone flips on the AC and electricity demand surges.

Mobile aeroderivative turbines from GE helped restore power to Mexico’s Baja peninsula after it was struck by a hurricane last fall. Image credit: GE Reports/GE Distributed Power

Aeroderivatives’ sturdy and compact design also allowed GE to put them on trailer and dispatch them wherever power is quickly needed. Princeton University used the technology to keep the campus lit and warm while the surrounding town went dark during Hurricane Sandy, and the generator sets – known as TM2500s - are also generating electricity on the edge of the Sahara in Algeria and in Egypt.

Besides providing reliable power, the turbine also allows TECO to cut enough carbon dioxide emissions by more that 32,000 tons per year, the equivalent of removing 4,000 cars from the road.

Not bad for a grounded aircraft engine.

By Amrita Mainthia

In the three months since GE said it would leave the bulk of its banking business and focus on growing its industrial core, the company has announced deals to sell assets of GE Capital valued at $68 billion.

That total includes today’s agreement to the terms to sell its European Sponsor Finance business, a leading provider of European mid-market, private-equity backed transactions, a deal valued at $2.2 billion. GE Capital said it was well on its way to sell assets valued at $100 billion by the end of the year.

This week alone, GE Capital announced two deals – today’s transaction as well as the sale of its global Fleet operation, which provides commercial car and truck financing and fleet management services.

New GE Capital structure will allow businesses like GE Capital Aviation Services (GECAS) to better support GE’s industrial core. At the recent Paris Air Show, for example, GECAS announced it would add 60 next-gen Airbus A320neo planes powered by LEAP engines to its portfolio. The LEAP was developed by CFM International, a joint company between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran). It features 3D-printed part, ceramic composites and other advanced materials. Image credits: Airbus (above) and GE Aviation (top).

“GE Capital continues to execute on its strategy to sell most of the assets of GE Capital, and these agreements show our businesses are of great interest to financial services firms around the world,” said Keith Sherin, GE Capital chairman and CEO. “We continue to demonstrate speed and execution on our strategy to sell most of the assets of GE Capital.”

GE disclosed plans to sell the majority of GE Capital assets and focus chiefly on its core industrial businesses in April. Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, said his goal was to create a simpler and more valuable industrial company.

Major milestones this year have included the sale of GE Capital Real Estate in April, and the U.S. and European Sponsor Finance and Fleet Services deals in June. Combined with previous signings to dispose of UK Home Lending mortgage portfolios and the close of the sale of GE Capital’s Hungarian Bank, the business says it is on track to reach its $100 billion year-end target.

Click here to download.

GE Capital said that most of its U.S. franchises earmarked for sale are already in the market, and that it had plans to place “most of the global assets in the marketplace officially around the end of the third quarter, early fourth quarter.” The company recently accelerated the timing for the completion of the exit from 2017 to the end of next year due to the high interest.

GE says the remaining GE Capital assets will drive growth by supporting its key industrial businesses such as aviation, healthcare and energy.

The portfolio repositioning will also give GE Capital the opportunity to apply for “de-designation” as a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI) in 2016.

GE says that by 2017, GE Capital’s ending net investment (ENI) will amount to approximately $90 billion, allowing the company’s industrial businesses to account for 90 percent of the company’s earnings.

GE estimates the transition has the potential to return more than $90 billion to investors in dividends, buyback and the Synchrony (a 2014 IPO) exchange through 2018.

By Zack Lord

How do you test a brand new locomotive? You take it to a custom track hooping over hundreds of high-altitude acres of a remote Colorado prairie, and push it hard to prove its mettle.

The tests typically include grueling series of tasks simulating high speed, heavy haul and other extreme conditions in one of America’s starkest and most beautiful landscapes.

GE engineers recently rode their newest Evolution Series locomotive that meets the EPA’s strict Tier 4 emission standards to the test track, which is located in Pueblo, Colo. But unless you are one of them, there’s no easy way for ordinary mortals to see what actually happens there.

Until now.

That’s because GE invited a team from the visual effects and animation company Reel FX to turn the tests into a virtual reality experience.

The team mounted a special rig using several GoPro cameras inside the engine’s cab and in a helicopter hovering above the locomotive while it’s in motion. They made two videos capturing 360-degree footage: one from the locomotive’s cab and the other from the chopper during the flyover.

Reel FX also visited Greenville, S.C., where GE is testing Harriet, the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine, so powerful it could inflate the Good Year blimp in less than 10 seconds.

VR videos from that unique $185-million test rig and from Pueblo are available on Samsung’s Milk VR, Oculus Share, and YouTube 360 platforms.

But the partners aren’t finished. Next up is “a portal into the human brain” that will allow visitors to explore neural circuits of the musician and photographer Reuben Wu, and observe how music affects his brain. Stay tuned.

By Tomas Kellner

On July 4, 1776, 13 American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and gave birth to the United States of America. A few centuries later, GE scientist Vincent Schaefer, who also happened to be born on the Fourth of July, worked hard on declaring America’s independence from the weather. Unlike the Founding Fathers, he did not succeed. But his ideas could still come handy someday.

Schaefer was part of a weather research team led by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir and included atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, brother of the bestselling author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In 1943, Schaefer made history when he started the world’s first artificial snowfall over Schenectady, N.Y.

Although this and other of the team’s feats have since slipped into oblivion, they were once considered so historic that in August 1950, Time magazine put Langmuir’s face on the cover over this caption: “Can man learn to control the atmosphere he lives in?” (Kurt Vonnegut immortalized a less helpful kind of ice science in his bestseller Cat’s Cradle.)

Top image: Irving Langmuir (left), Vincent Schaefer (center), and Bernard Vonnegut are making snow in Schaefer’s cold box. Above: Researcher Willis Whitney (left) and Schaefer are making a cloud in a box. All images preserved by the Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science

The research, which GE called “Project Cirrus,” grew out of the company’s study of icing that sometimes developed on aircraft wings and crippled planes during World War II. (GE is still involved in icing research, using the world’s most powerful supercomputers.) “The results of Project Cirrus’s five years of weather research will have a profound influence upon domestic and world economics,” said a 1952 summary of the scientific effort published in G-E Review, a GE magazine. “Making it rain, modifying thunderstorms and hurricanes, and clearing ground fogs near airports are some of the vital possibilities.”

Top: “Photomicrographs” of the snowflakes Schaefer created in his cold box. Above: Snow - the finished product.

There were several tools the team used to coax rain or snow out of the clouds. One of them, called “cloud seeding,” used droplets of water and other materials “supercooled” to minus 40 degree Celsius (-40 F) to condense air moisture into ice crystals inside a “cold box” - really a commercial freezer made by GE Appliances and anywhere.

Then one summer day in 1943, Schaefer gave himself a birthday present. “Finally, one July day when the temperature of the chamber was not low enough, he dropped a big piece of dry ice into to lower the temperature,” wrote the G-E Review. “In an instant, the air was full of ice crystals.”

Schaefer (right) with members of his team is seeding with cold box with frozen carbon dioxide, a.k.a. dry ice. 

Schaefer discovered that tiny grains of dry ice would transform the supercooled air inside the cold box and create many millions of ice crystals. In 1946, his colleague Bernard Vonnegut improved on the method and used silver iodide smoke, a substance whose crystals are very similar to ice, to start ice formation in cold air. The effect was so strong the team calculated “all the air of the United States could be nucleated at one time with a few pounds of silver iodide.” (It seems that Kurt passed on this data point as an idea for a book.)

Making ice and snow sometimes involved fire. Bernard Vonnegut’s method called “rain by fire” used burning charcoal to create tiny silver iodide particles. (See description below.)

Schaefer (left) and Bernard Vonnegut (right) also used a pop gun to seed the cold box. Bernard Vonnegut’s brother, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, was employed as a writer by GE at the time of snow research, and knew members of the Project Cirrus team. Langmuir even became the model for scientist Felix Hoenikker in his book Cat’s Cradle, who invents a material called ice-nine that’s stable at room temperature. The idea for the book, however, came from a different source. See here.

Schaefer and GE test pilot Curtis Talbot climbed into a small Fairchild plane and tested the discovery in the skies above the lab on November 13, 1943. “Curt flew into the cloud and I started the dispenser in operation,” Schaefer wrote in his lab notebook. “I dropped about three pounds (of dry ice) and then swung around and headed south. About the time I looked toward the rear, I was thrilled to see long streamers of snow falling from the base of the cloud through which we had just passed.”

The first artificial snowfall fell from this cloud that drifted over Schenectady on November 13, 1943.

Project Cirrus really took off in 1947, when as many six Navy and Air Force planes were seeding clouds in places as far apart as New Mexico and Hawaii. One of the aircraft was a modified B-17 bomber whose glass nose bristled with instruments such as cloud meter, rain catcher, psychrometer for measuring humidity, and many others.
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Top: A team member is loading a modified B-17 bomber with dry ice for cloud seeding. Above: The nose of the plane bristled with special instruments. Schaefer stands in dark coveralls under it.

By then, the team had also figured out that many different substances could seed clouds, including common salt.

Langmuir reported that observations in Puerto Rico and Hawaii “indicate[d] that it should be frequently possible to induce heavy rainfall by introducing salt into the trade wind at the rate of about one ton in the form of fine dust particles of about 25 microns in diameter.”

Perhaps the most daring part of the project took place during the 1947 hurricane season in the skies off the coast of Florida and Alabama. On October 13, the team spotted a storm that “consisted of an eye of approximately 30 miles in diameter, surrounded by a thick wall of clouds extending from about 800 feet up into the cirrus overcast at 20,000 feet and sing some 30-50 miles thick,” according to an observer account.

The team loaded the modified B-17 seeding plane with dry ice and sent up another B-17 to record the operation and a larger B-29 bomber as the control aircraft with Schaefer on board. Although they steered clear of the eye of the storm, they dropped 80 pounds of dry ice along a 110-mile track circling the hurricane at 19,200 feet.

The team used a number of unique instruments to document their project. Top: Schaefer is tracking cloud movement. Above: The snow crystal recorder tracked the shape, size and frequency of falling ice crystals.

“No attempt was made to penetrate through the wall of the storm into the eye or to seed in or near the squall line, owing to the failure of the group’s homing aids (radio, compass, and visual flares),” the observer reported. “”It was thought that such an attempt, although desirable, would likely result in a separation of the aircraft, with subsequent abortion on the primary mission.”

Still, Schaefer, who was ensconced in the safety on the B-29, saw “many suitable clouds for seeding operations occur in this type of hurricane … Owing to the complex structure of this ‘old’ storm, it is believed that a ‘young’ hurricane would provide much more satisfactory data for estimating the effect of seeding operations.” Langmuir added: “The stakes are large … I think we should be able to abolish the evil effects of these hurricanes.”

The team also studied and recorder the dynamics of falling raindrops.

Despite the results, size of the stakes and Langmuir’s face on the cover of Time, Project Cirrus ran out of government funding in 1952. Still, the team suggested that research could help fight drought and ground fog, prevent hail, and modify thunderstorms. “So many other research projects had been stimulated that the continued progress in the search for new and basic knowledge of weather phenomena seems assured,” wrote the G-E Review.

But funding was just one obstacle. The country didn’t have (and still doesn’t) laws that would govern “artificial weather modification.”

After Project Cirrus ended, Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut moved on to new positions outside GE, and continued to study weather. They ultimately reunited at the University of Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center.

Given that California is drying up and Texas, which had suffered from a multi-year drought, recently got all that missing rain in just a few short weeks and went through flooding on a Biblical scale, maybe it’s time to look into Schaefer’s research again.

By Mike Keller

Where do super powers come from? For Superman, it was his Kryptonian body that allowed him to harvest energy from the sun and obtain super strength. For Batman, it was his superior technology that allowed him to best his opponents.

But truth can be stranger than fiction. New supermaterials developed by GE scientists - like “super” ceramics called CMCs  that can work inside a jet engine, fourth-generation carbon fiber composites and water-repellent, or superhydrophobic coatings - bestow what seems like superpowers on everything from jet engines to wind turbines and  power plants. (GE calls this idea of sharing the same advanced technologies between different products and businesses the GE store.)

Click here to download.

The LEAP is the bestselling engine in GE Aviation’s history and the first jet engine with CMC parts. Image credit: GE Reports/Adam Senatori

Obviously, GE is not developing materials with super properties just for the thrill of it. The company has spent billions of dollars to come up with materials like CMCs  and uses them to get a competitive edge.

For example, the LEAP jet engine, the world’s first engine with CMC parts, has already become the bestselling jet engine in GE history, even though it won’t enter service until 2016. The engine was developed by CFM International, a joint company between GE and France’s Snecma (Safran), and CFM has received orders for 9,550 LEAP engines valued at $134 billion, to date.

But big business doesn’t mean the company can’t have little fun with the materials. That’s why GE decided to create a new class of superheroes based on the materials’ qualities.

The company timed the coming out party for the characters, which include Captain CMC, the Carbon Fiber Crusader, and the Super Hydrophobic Woman, for Comic-Con International, the World’s Fair for comics lovers starting this week in San Diego.

Take a look at the graphics below to learn more about these characters and the stuff they are made of.

Click here to download.

Click here to download.

Engineer Nick Cray squats next to a carbon fiber composite blade for the GE90 engine. The material allowed GE to build the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine. The blade is now part of the design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Image credit: GE Reports

Click here to download.

Hydrophobic materials have applications across many industries, from aviation to wind power. GIF credits: GE Reports

By Tomas Kellner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tomas Kellner

There were crowds of people lining the roads in northeast France last week, waiting to catch a glimpse of a world champion passing by.

But rather than cheering a peloton of Tour de France racers – a favorite French pastime in early July – they have been waiting for a steel centipede that’s as long as a football field (109 meters) and weighs approximately 800 tons – almost twice the weight of a fully loaded Boeing 747. Since last Monday, it has been traveling from a GE factory in the French city of Belfort to its new home inside a power plant operated by national utility Électricité de France (EDF) in the town of Bouchain more than 330 miles away.

Roughly half of the convoy’s weight is concentrated in the centipede’s cargo: HArriet, the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbine. Officially known as the 9HA, the turbine can achieve efficiency north of 61 percent when combined with a steam turbine. Put another way, that’s like Australian rider Rohan Dennis posting the fastest time ever in the Tour’s opening time trial. The machine achieves the efficiency because it uses advanced coatings, combustors and compressor parts originally developed by GE Aviation for jet engines. (GE calls this cross-pollination of technologies between its businesses the GE store.)

“The atmosphere along the way has been a lot like the Tour, except that we rarely break 10 mph,” laughs Sebastien Patard, from GE’s fulfillment and logistics team, who is traveling with the turbine. “This is one of the largest public transports in Europe’s history and we’re surrounded by people everywhere we stop. We’re even using our Twitter account to make it easier for them to find us and let them know where we are going to be.”

The entire convoy is 109 meters long (358 feet), 6.65 meters wide (22 feet) and 5.7 meters high (19 feet). The center stretcher, which carries the 400-ton turbine, rolls on two tow platforms, each with 14 rows of triple-tire axles. Image credit: GE Power & Water

The planning involved precise studies of the turning radius available along every section of the 148-km route (92 miles) from Belfort to Strasbourg, Image credit: GE Power & Water

Before Patard set off for the journey, his team, led by GE’s transportation gurus Hervé Malaval, an expert in heavy lift, and Thierry Dantec, the company’s European logistics leader, had spent three years preparing for it.

A big job requires big tools. Workers used these wrenches to remove road signs and reinstall them after the convoy passed. Image  credit: GE Power & Water

The team checked every curve in the road and built digital models of bridges and bypasses to make sure the convoy could ride over them. GE and local communities across northern France have also invested in road improvements to prepare for the transports, and the company commissioned a special rig to move the turbine. “Normally you would have a trailer with 20 lines of wheels to move something this heavy, but then we would be too long to make the required turns,” Patard says.

Instead, the team is using a trailer that has three parts. Each part can turn up to a point where it is at a right angle to the next piece. The first and last segments have 14 lines of wheels each and support the middle section, which carries the turbine. The whole rig is being pulled and pushed from behind by four trucks. “Their positions keep changing,” Patard says. “Sometimes we have three trucks pulling and one pushing when we go up a steeper slope.”

Still, the convoy is so heavy that the team had to order extra trucks loaded with ballast to cross a bridge near Colmar (incidentally the birthplace of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of New York’s Statue of Liberty). “The bridge has specific architecture that required us to pull the trucks alongside the convoy and provide counterbalance and prevent damage from twisting the supporting structure,” Patard says.

YouTube member ttxdudu90 watched the convoy leave Belfort on Monday.

This is the second HArriet to leave Belfort in a year - the first one was a prototype GE is now testing in the U.S. -  but the convoys will soon become a more common sight. GE has a backlog of 16 units and the company said it has been “technically selected” for 53 more.

The design of the rig was influenced by the acceptable load on the roads and allowed GE to distribute the turbine’s weight. Image  credit: GE Power & Water

The convoy travels with police escorts (4 people on motorcycles), private escorts (2 motorcyclists, one car in front, one car at the end) and local escorts, in addition to members of GE’s logistics team. Image  credit: GE Power & Water

Like the Tour de France, the transport will have numerous stages that will last through the first half of July. But only the first nine days will be on land. On Tuesday, July 7, workers in the port of Strasbourg will move the turbine on a barge and send it down the Rhine River to Germany, the Netherlands and then back south through Belgium to France along the River Escaut (see map below). “The EDF power plant in Bouchain is right next to the [river], so the last leg over land will be just half a mile,” Patard says.

Once in operation, the turbine will be able to generate up to 600 megawatts in combined cycle, enough to power the equivalent of approximately 700,000 French homes. Take a look at our photo essay from HArriet’s journey to Strasbourg.

Sometimes the team had to remove medians and road signs for the convoy to pass. Image credit: GE Power & Water

The two trucks filled with ballast pull up next to HArriet on the bridge in Colmar. Image credit: GE Power & Water

The 9HA turbine, aka HArriet, is the world’s largest and most powerful gas turbine. Harriet can reach a combined cycle efficiency that exceeds 61 percent, a number that has been called the Holy Grail in the power generation business.GIF and image credits: GE Power & Water

By Tomas Kellner

In 1894, California businessman Henry L. Williams drilled a pair of oil wells at the end of a pier sticking out 300 feet into the Pacific Ocean in Summerland, some 90 minutes up the coast from Los Angeles, and drew the first offshore oil.

Today there are tens of thousands of subsea wells around the world - some as deep as 9,000 feet below sea level and many miles from the coast - producing millions of barrels of oil. Keeping them working efficiently, especially now, when the oil margins are thin, is no small challenge. The industry estimates that operators lose as much as $3 million in revenue per week when a well goes out of commission.

No wonder all kinds of companies operating in the energy space have started looking for ways to reduce unplanned downtime as close to zero as possible. “Telling a customer what to fix after it has failed is relatively easy,” said Bob Judge, director of product management at GE Oil & Gas. “Telling them to fix something before it costs them money is the magic.”

That magic is also the idea behind a new partnership between BP and GE’s Intelligent Platforms unit. Next year, BP will use GE’s Predix software platform to connect 650 wells to the Industrial Internet. If all goes according to plan, the companies will expand the scope to 4,000 BP subsea wells around the world. “We will help them to get connected, get insights and get optimized,” says Kate Johnson, CEO of GE Intelligent Platforms Software.

Top: BP’s Valhalla platform in the North Sea. Above: The Savonette platform is located offshore Trinidad and Tobago and and has a production capacity of one billion cubic feet per day. Image credit: BP p.l.c.

The Industrial Internet is a network connecting machines jet engines, gas turbines, locomotives and other machines to software and analytics. GE estimates the Industrial Internet could add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP in efficiency gains over the next two decades.

The oil well software will harvest information from sensors monitoring vibrations, temperature, pressure and other well properties. It will store, contextualize and visualize the data, and provide the right BP workers with real-time insights. The ultimate goal is to improve well performance, production and minimize downtime.

“Right now, if something fails, you have to send a person and a part to fix it,” Johnson says. “We want to eliminate unexpected failures. That’s the value right in front of your face. But the idea is that it will also allow us to obtain new insights into making the machines work better.”

BP’s Jim Cunningham oil rig off the coast of Angola. Image credit: BP p.l.c.

Johnson says that the software used by BP is “equipment-agnostic” and can easily work with data from non-GE machines. Peter Griffiths, BP’s system operations strategist, says the software will help BP move away from costly “bespoke solutions to off-the-shelf industry solutions,” increase standardization and improve oversight and decision making.

Griffiths told Fortune  that BP wanted to build a process that could be replicated across the world at all of its wells. “This is a more standardized way of us doing something,” he told the magazine. “Previously we had four or five ways of doing it and now have a much more consistent approach.”

The first 650 wells should come online in early 2016, and the rest are scheduled to follow over the next several years. The first batch of wells includes far-flung operations stretching from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Angola to the North Sea.

But the wells could be just the beginning. The Predix platform is scalable and could be easily extended to monitoring gas turbines and other heavy machinery. GE software already works in hospitals, monitors jet engines and helps railroads optimize their schedules. GE earned $4 billion from software in 2014 and the company expects that number to grow to $7 billion next year.

“There will be more than one billion connected machines by 2020,” Johnson says. “Once you get insights, you’ll be able to make them work better and more efficiently, no matter what they are.”

By Victoria Ifan

As an engineering student at Stanford University in the 1980s, Garry Gold was leading an active lifestyle, running marathons and playing sports. But then he tore his ACL - the connective tissue that links the thighbone to the shinbone at the knee - during a routine pickup basketball game.

He bounced back after reconstructive surgery and some time off, but the old injury struck back a decade later when he developed arthritis in the knee. “I didn’t think too much about it, the knee seemed to be just fine,” he says about his injury. “[But] after many years of playing sports the knee kind of went south.” He is now helping save professional players as well as weekend warriors from a similar ordeal.

Dr. Gold - his  fascination with medical imaging led him from engineering to medicine and to his current job at Stanford as radiology professor - is using his personal experience and professional knowledge to advise a new collaboration between the National Basketball Association and GE Healthcare to promote orthopedic and sports medicine research. 

The advisory board will be chaired by Dr. John DiFiori, the NBA’s director of sports medicine, and the multi-year project will focus on joint health and acute and overuse musculoskeletal injuries of the muscles, nerves, tendons, cartilage and other body parts, and look for new ways to diagnose them, treat them, and prevent them.

GIF above: Physicians often want to see the full joint in multiple 2D planes to better diagnose a patient or plan a surgical intervention. 3D MRI data creates images of the cartilage surface, meniscus, and tendons as shown here. Some minor cartilage degeneration is seen in this patient’s knee. Top image: Cartilage can degrade (red spot in the color overlay) and wear down over time due to injury or degenerative joint disease like osteoarthritis.

GE has deep expertise in medical imaging technology and the collaboration, which is part of the company’s healthymagination initiative,  will provide funding for clinical researchers studying diagnostic and preventative techniques to identify risks for the development of orthopedic conditions.

“The research from this collaboration has the potential to benefit not just NBA players but all athletes and people who tear their ACL or meniscus while skiing, playing football or doing almost anything,” Dr. Gold says. “If we can learn more about what causes ongoing wear and tear to the joints in the body, it will really have broad implications on health and wellness for the general population.”

Musculoskeletal injuries are often caused and prolonged by sudden exertion, repetition, force, vibration and other factors. Dr. Gold says that professionals and amateurs alike are often too eager to return to their previous level of activity after an injury. “We have some hypotheses on why arthritis develops over time,“ Dr. Gold says. "There could be new wear and tear on joints in the body that weren’t stressed before the ACL surgery, or just the slow biochemical reaction process in the joint slowly breaks down the tissue in the joint,” Dr. Gold says.

GE and NBA said the research will contribute to a “deeper understanding of overuse injuries and the resulting impact on athletes’ lives.” They plan to start seeking research proposals later this year.

By Connolly Jurkiewicz

Electrical storms and lightning have been around since Earth’s infancy – possibly even sparking first life. Yet 4.5 billion years later we still understand strikingly little about how they work, including such basics like what causes lightning and how it travels.

That’s not exactly reassuring, given an estimated 100 lightning bolts hit the surface of the planet every second, each carrying between 100 million to 1 billion volts. (American sockets supply just 110 volts and European 220 volts.) Their energy can raise the air temperature to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit in a few millionths of a second.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that if a person lives to be 80, the chances of her or him being struck by lightning in the U.S. are 1 in 3,000. (The odds of winning the current PowerBall are 1 in 292,000,000.) Lightning strikes kill 30 Americans on average every year.

In the 1920s, GE set up the High Voltage Engineering Laboratory in Pittsfield, Mass., to study lightning. The work included a “special project” exploring the phenomena from a room on the 102th floor of New York City’s Empire State Building - see video below. (The skyscraper still gets struck 100 times per year, on average.)

The company even built a million-volt lightning generator in 1922, studying for the first time the effects of lightning strikes and power surges on electrical systems in a controlled laboratory setting, says Chris Hunter, curator of the GE collection at the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady. Take a look at the history.

GE engineers test an indoor lightning generator for the 1939 - 1940 New York World’s Fair. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library archives and brought to life by Kevin Weir / flux machine.

The cover of GE’s 1951 Annual Report included an exterior shot of the High Voltage Lab. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

The team studying lightning on top of the Empire State Building used an early high-speed camera developed by Sir Charles Boys to photograph strikes. Below: A description of the work. Image credits: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Thomas Edison and Charles Steinmetz examine pieces of isolators struck by Steinmetz’s lightning generator. Image credits: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady