By Tomas Kellner

Egypt’s economic reforms and rapidly growing economy are drawing billions of dollars in new investments. But money is not the sole lifeblood of growth in this North African country of 85 million people.

Equally important is electricity and the country’s power plants - like almost anywhere on the continent - are already operating at peak capacity. “We’ve seen this most recently during the holy month of Ramadan, which ended in mid-July and fell on one of the hottest periods of the year,” says Sofiane Ben Tounes, president and CEO of GE North East Africa. “During Ramadan, peak demand doesn’t last just a few hours, but into the night after people break their fast at sunset.”

GE has been helping the Egyptian government keep the lights on. The company said that it has added 1.84 gigawatts of new power generation capacity this year and plans to deliver a total of 2.6 gigawatts this summer.

The rapid rollout is part of a power deal that the Egyptian government signed with the company last December. When the 2.6 gigawatts come online, it will be enough to supply 2.5 million Egyptian homes.

GE will supply Egypt with 34 “aeroderivative” gas turbines to boost the country’s power supply. That total includes 14 LM6000 aeroderivatice turbines whose beating heart is a high pressure compressor originally developed for the CF6 high-bypass turbofan jet engine that powers many Boeing 747s, including Air Force One. Image credit: GE Reports. Top: The Pyramids at Giza Image credit: Getty Images

Many of the GE machines that are already producing electricity in Egypt are so-called aeroderivative turbines. They can be mounted on trailers and quickly deployed pretty much anywhere. The turbines are built around technology from GE jet engines – hence the “aero” in their name – and ramp up to full power in just 10 minutes - almost like a plane readying for takeoff. GE calls this technology sharing among its businesses the “GE store.”

Aeroderivatives are ideal for bridging electricity needs before large, permanent power plants come online, and also for generating backup power.

The rotor from the high pressure turbine of the CF6 jet engine. The blades are peppered with tiny holes that bleed in cooling air and prevent them from melting. Image credit: GE Reports

According to Egyptian estimates, the country must increase its capacity every year by an average of 5.2 gigawatts through 2022 to meet the rising demand. The government calls the roadmap for this ramp up the Egyptian Power Boost Program.

When the “power boost” is completed, there will be over 130 new GE gas turbines generating 11.68 gigawatts in Egypt. That’s enough to meet the power demand of the equivalent of 10.5 million local homes. By then, GE technology will be supporting over 30 percent of the country’s electricity needs.

New power lines in Egypt. Image credit: GE Power & Water

A mobile power plant using an aeroderivative gas turbine. Image credit: GE Power & Water

A new power plant built in the Egyptian desert. Image credit: GE Power & Water

By Tomas Kellner

The large German port of Kiel sits at the end of a deep Baltic fjord that cuts into the flat coastal landscape like a bad case of chapped lips. The fjord has long protected the area’s sea merchants, the German Navy’s Baltic Fleet, and helped make the city the sailing capital of the world during the annual Kiel Week.

But Kiel has more ambitions than just being known for boats. In 2008, the port was one of 15 cities behind the European Green Capital Award– an initiative designed to push cities towards healthier, sustainable and more environmentally friendly living. The port is now moving closer to claiming the title.

The local city utility just ordered 20 highly efficient Jenbacher gas engines capable of producing a combined 190 megawatts of electricity and another 192 megawatts of heat. The engines will allow Kiel to shut down a coal-fired heat and electricity plant and reduce its C02 emissions by more than 1.25 million tons.

Above: Inside and outside renditions of the new plant. Image credit: GE Distributed Power Top: Every summer, Kiel becomes the sailing capital of the world during Kiel Week. Image credit: Shutterstock

This is the largest Jenbacher gas engine order since the company opened in the Austrian Alpine town of Jenbach in 1959. GE acquired the business in 2003. Since then, the gas engine manufacturer’s revenues have quadrupled. More than 15,500 Jenbacher gas engines have been supplied to over 170 countries.

Kiel bought the largest and most advanced version of the Jenbacher gas engine, the J920 FleXtra. The engine’s combined efficiency in converting gas into heat and power tops 90 percent. Its electrical efficiency alone is 45 percent. “This is the first clean-sheet new engine design that GE’s Jenbacher gas engines product line has done in a long time,” says Patrick Frigge, a product line leader for power generating gas engines at GE Power & Water. “This is not a scaled up engine. This is not an improvement on an engine. This is the most efficient simple cycle engine in GE’s portfolio.”

But the high efficiency is just one part of the story. The other main aspect is the new plant’s “flexibility,” which will make it easier for the utility to feed renewable energy into the grid.

Here’s how it works: Like much of Germany, the landscape around Kiel is studded with wind turbines spinning in the Baltic breeze and supplying locals with wind power. The new engines will be a key complement to these wind farms and help the utility to increase the share of renewable power in the grid.

The new plant will help Kiel incorporate wind power into the grid. Here, a ship carrying wind turbine blades on a canal near the port. Image credit: Shutterstock.

That’s because they are designed to kick up into high gear in just minutes when the wind stops blowing and replace the lost power. Frigge says that with these engines, Kiel will have the flexibility to be able to start up, meet the demand and then shut down quickly without wasting fuel when the wind picks up.

In fact, the power station in Kiel will be the most flexible large-scale power plant in Germany and a flagship project for Energiewende, an unprecedented energy turnaround the country is currently going through. The turnaround will allow Germany to phase out nuclear power and generate 80 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2050.

A “flexible” Jenbacher J920 FleXtra gas engine is already helping the Bavarian town of Rosenheim amp up its renewable energy usage, and six of the engines are also heading to Texas. Another J920 FleXtra engine will go into operation in Hamburg later this year. Kiel plans to start building the heat and power plant in May 2016.

By Tomas Kellner

If everything goes according to plan, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, throwing off terabytes of data every day. This huge digital menagerie will include everything from consumer gadgets like Apple Watches and Nest thermostats to jet engines and entire power plants.

There are already plenty of massive datacenters that store music, photos, workout information and other consumer data. But GE believes that industrial data, which is growing twice as fast as any other sector, needs its own secure, heavy-duty cloud that can hold and process information that’s not always in the best shape. “The data we’re storing is very different from a Facebook picture, which is pretty well defined,” says Harel Kodesh, vice president and general manager for GE’s Predix software platform at GE Software. “Some of the sensors on machines may not be working properly and their data is dirty. It needs to be cleaned, normalized, compressed and ingested in a secure and efficient manner.”

That’s why GE said today that it’s going to launch the first cloud service designed specifically for industrial data and analytics. “A cloud built exclusively to capture and analyze machine data will make unforeseen problems and missed opportunities a complication of the past,” Kodesh says.

GE’s software revenue’s reached $4 billion in 2014 and the company expects to reach $6 billion this year. GIF credits: GE Reports

Kodesh says that the Predix Cloud, as GE calls it, will allow airlines, hospitals, oil companies and other users to quickly capture and analyze large volumes of many different kinds of industrial data – from 3D MRI images to locomotive exhaust data - in a secure environment. “The nature of the devices we’re dealing with is very different from tablets or smartphones,” he says. “They are often considered part of critical infrastructure.”

The Predix Cloud is important since the volume of machine data is growing so fast and also because this fire hose won’t turn off anytime soon. According to estimates, businesses are planning to invest $60 trillion in the digital infrastructure over the next 15 years. Analyzing data faster and more efficiently in a secure space could save companies billions of dollars every year.

Sham Chotai, chief technology officer for software at GE Power & Water, says the Predix Cloud has already allowed a Texas wind farm with 273 turbines to increase its annual energy production by 3 to 5 percent. That’s like adding 21 turbines, he says. “We are creating an environment that never existed before,” he says. “The Predix cloud is a secure place, like a gated community. You have to be invited in. Our customers can take their apps there.”

The Predix Cloud will also allow users to handle data from different cloud environments, give access to app developers, but also silo data according to regulatory requirements. “GE’s Predix Cloud will unlock an industrial app economy that delivers more value to machines, fleets and factories,” Kodesh says. “It will enable a thriving developer community to collaborate and rapidly deploy industrial applications in a highly protected environment.”

Kodesh says that GE will start by building two data centers in the U.S. – one on each coast. It will then expand the cloud abroad to areas rich with connected machines. “Facebook doesn’t have the biggest footprint in the Middle East because there aren’t that many people,” he says. “But we will be there in full force.“

By Patric Rayburn

When a moderate earthquake shook Mexico City just after midnight in June 2013, an eerie staccato of bright flashes punctured the darkened metropolis. They came from distribution and power transformers exploding around the city. It wasn’t an isolated incident. In December of the same year, another exploding station transformer shut down an NBA game between San Antonio Spurs and Minnesota Timberwolves in the Mexico City Arena. “Transformer failures can be disruptive and dangerous,” says Enrique Betancourt, an R&D leader from the transformer manufacturer Prolec-GE, a joint venture between GE and Mexico’s Xignux consortium. 

To be sure, transformers may fail and incidentally catch fire everywhere – most memorably in New York City during Hurricane Sandy. But in Mexico City, a densely packed metropolis of more than 21 million inhabitants, such failures carry special urgency. “Large transformers are located near the public and though fire prevention measures are available, balancing cost and transformer performance can be difficult,” Betancourt says.

Top GIF and video: A conventional network transformer ruptures and spews coolant during a case rupture test. These tests are necessary for building safe transformers and a key part of their design. Credits: GE Energy Management

That’s why Prolec-GE started working with Mexico’s largest utility, Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), to develop a less flammable transformer design using an ester-based liquid that cools the insides of the transformers. “The synthetic ester makes them safer and prevents fires,” Betancourt says. “It has a high flash point, which makes it virtually impossible to burn in the event of an accident.”

Why do transformers need cooling? Like most cities, Mexico City gets electricity from large power plants located on the outskirts. The electricity flows along power lines to a series of substations located in more central neighborhoods. The substations transform the electricity from high voltage to low voltage and send it to homes and businesses.

There is always some power lost in the transformation process and these losses create copious amounts of heat. That’s why large transformers hold up to 10,000 gallons of coolant, traditionally flammable mineral oil. When there is an accident, this oil can catch on fire. “Fires in transformers can be highly dangerous and devastating to areas in close proximity to the substation,” says Federico Ibarra, technical manager at CFE. “When a transformer fire occurs in indoor substations or densely populated areas, the impact can be amplified exponentially.”

The ester-based coolant in the new transformers was developed by CFE and Prolec-GE engineers. It requires more than twice as much heat as mineral oil to catch fire. The fluid is also biodegradable, which makes it more manageable in the event of a spill.

The fluid’s applications will reach beyond Mexico City. According to the UN, more than half of the world’s population already lives in cities and that number will likely grow to 66 percent by 2050. At the same time, electricity demand is estimated to increase by 78 percent by 2040. “Clearly, we will have more power equipment near where more people are living closer together,” Betancourt says. “We need to keep them as safe as possible.”

By Tomas Kellner

GE didn’t invent the jet engine, but it built the first one in America during World War II. It was no accident. The company had been making turbines for power plants and superchargers for propeller planes for decades. Without all that knowledge, the jet age would’ve taken longer to lift off.

The Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, N.Y., not far from GE’s current global research headquarters, holds a treasure trove of GE history. Chris Hunter, the museum’s vice president for collections and exhibitions, found a comic book from 1958 that tells the whole story of how GE turbine engineers turned Sir Frank Whittle’s jet engine design into a working machine that in 1942 powered America’s first jet plane.

(The reason why GE published comics is a whole different tale. It used what was then perhaps the most viral medium to explain and demystify science, just like it uses Snapchat or Instagram today. You can read that story here.)

Jet engines today look very different from Sir Frank’s machine, but the jet engine history - shaped by both men and women - illustrates one important point:  that the synergies that exist inside the company make the whole more valuable than the sum of its parts. GE executives call this concept the GE store. Just as turbine know-how allowed the company to build the jet engine, later jet engine research funneled knowledge back to other units and led to more efficient power plants, locomotives and ships. Take a look.

All images courtesy of the Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady

By Patric Rayburn

Last December, Egypt decided to move aggressively to avoid power cuts and brownouts during its sweltering desert summer, when the average high temperature hovers above 90 degrees Fahrenheit for months. It had little time to spare. The heat starts rising early in the spring and country’s existing power plants were already operating at peak capacity to support Egypt’s booming economy.

So the Egyptian government signed a deal with GE, one of the world’s largest makers of turbines and other power generation equipment, to expand the country’s power generation capacity by 2.6 gigawatts - enough to supply 2.5 million local homes - by the end of the summer. Sounds simple enough, but it wasn’t. “It’s one thing to ship hundreds of tons of power equipment to a country, but it’s quite another thing to actually see the benefits of the electricity it produced,” says Rusty Bonnett, GE projects leader for gas turbines. “For that, you need a transmission and distribution infrastructure. Without it, it’s like having a car without wheels. You can run the engine, but it won’t go anywhere.“

To get power moving, GE mobilized hundreds of workers and engineers essentially around the world: from the Middle East and Europe to the US and even its venture partner XD Electric in China. The company did this to cut the time it needed to make transmission and distribution equipment from five months to six weeks.

Tian Liu, who directed the project for GE Digital Energy, was constantly working with information in Chinese, English, Spanish and Arabic. He says that meetings during the installation and commissioning phase often resembled “a game of Telephone,” with team members translating from one language to the next down the conference table. The team worked through Christmas and Chinese Spring Festival to deliver the equipment on the tight schedule.

But nothing was quite as heavy a lift as actually moving some of the machines from a factory in Changzhou, China, to North Africa. GE hired a giant Antonov An-124 Ruslan, one of the world’s largest cargo planes, and loaded them with four massive Generator Step Up Transformers, which weigh 100 tons each, or as much as 50 elephants, and other heavy-duty equipment (see photos). The team used a separate 747 jumbo jet to transport 30 tons of transformer oil to meet the timetable.

(Last fall, the company used the same planes to ship mobile power plants to Baja, in Mexico, and help the peninsula quickly restore power after it was hit by a deadly hurricane.)

These transformers were a critical part of the puzzle. They boost the voltage of the electricity generated by the turbines so it can be efficiently transmitted over the grid.

In the end, the breakneck pace allowed GE to install 34 gas turbines in Egypt in a record 6 months – more than 50 percent faster than the typical installation time. “This is a record even for GE,” Bonnett says. “We’ve never worked faster.”

Image credits: GE Reports

By Mike Keller

Nothing says summertime in Georgia like a dip in the old swimming hole. But near the town of Baxley, there’s one pool that’s not open to the public: the crystal-clear blue waters of the containment vessel bathing the Edwin Irby Hatch Power Plant’s nuclear reactor.

Although this is no place for a swim, the vessel must be monitored. In the past, during scheduled maintenance and refueling downtimes, multiple inspectors would clamber onto platforms that extended above the pool and plunge into the vessel cameras mounted on poles or tied to ropes. Using such handheld devices allowed them to get a close-up view of the welds in the reactor pressure vessel and also surfaces that had to be kept in perfect order. It worked, but it was a slow process and the inspectors had to protect themselves from radiation from the fuel below.

But now the team has a new member that’s happy to jump in. He’s called Stinger, the swimming robot, and allows nuclear plant personnel to go places no human could reach before.

Stinger, which is a bit taller than an average human, is a steerable unmanned underwater vehicle. He comes equipped with multidirectional, computer-controlled thrusters and a high-resolution color video camera. “Where Stinger’s camera and tools need to operate, a human could not survive in that location,” says Brandon Smith, the GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy mechanical engineer who led development of the machine. “That’s exactly why we need robotics to do this kind of work. There’s just no other way to do it and Stinger is built specifically to operate in that type of environment.”

The first-of-its-kind remote-operated vehicle is now being deployed to nuclear power plants across the U.S. as they go through scheduled refueling and inspection outages. It dives in the reactor pool for up to three weeks, using cameras to get a good look at material degradation. In addition to its camera technology, it also carries a high-pressure water nozzle, or hydrolaser, to clean metallic surfaces to ensure a good, clean look at the welds.

Smith and his team gave the robot a tungsten frock for protection and electronics that are less susceptible to high radiation levels. A single technician can operate it remotely from a tent hundreds of feet away from the vessel. The robot is connected through a power and control umbilical to the on-site operator and off-site, certified inspectors.

“The technician uses Stinger’s cameras to look for signs of degradation,” says Smith. “It’s really good at getting into constricted spaces and around tight corners to look for any sign that a component might fail—to catch something before it becomes a problem.”

Stinger is now successfully performing inspections throughout the U.S. nuclear industry. Smith says customers like it because it can work longer with fewer concerns about radiation exposure. It can also perform its job while other outage operations are going on since it doesn’t need inspectors to be suspended above the reactor pool. These benefits translate to shorter plant downtime and lower safety risks to employees.

“Our customers make money when their plants are producing power, so they’re always trying to reduce the length of necessary downtime,” says Smith. “They’re also always looking to reduce radiation exposure to workers. By moving Stinger in and workers away to a lower dose area, they are able to accomplish both goals.”

Image credits: GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy

By Tomas Kellner

William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand. Sumitra Rajagopalan, founder and CEO of the Canadian smart materials company Bioastra Technologies Inc., has a similar disposition.

At its core, Bioastra is a health and medical devices company working with some of the largest businesses in the industry to commercialize advanced biomaterials for the next-generation medical technologies such as injectable implants, and drug delivery and microbial detection systems. But that didn’t stop Rajagopalan from entering an open innovation challenge seeking to replace sand used for hydraulic fracturing inside oil and gas wells with a better material. “We take the human body paradigm and we apply it to everything,” she says. “There’s nothing worse than a wasted idea.”

GE and the Norwegian energy company Statoil launched the challenge earlier this year. Oil and gas fracturing works by pumping pressurized water mixed with sand or ceramics into wells. The water pressure opens tiny fissures in rock holding oil and gas. The sand grains keep the cracks open, allowing the contents to escape. However, it takes many tons of sand and hundreds of truck trips to keep the wells going. “The result is road wear, noise, dust and emissions,” says Eric Gebhardt, chief technology officer at GE Oil & Gas. “We opened the challenge because we were looking for a better way to do it.”

Bioastra was named one of the five winners in July. “Many of us have caught the open innovation bug,” she says. “We are working on things such as injectable implants that respond to external stimuli like temperature, and change from liquid to solid in the body. But to be honest, the material doesn’t care whether you put it inside the body or inside an oil well.”

Above: Hoowaki’s X-shaped articles on the right and sand grains on the left. Image credit: Hoowlaki. Top: Sand used by Statoil for hydraulic fracturing today. Image credit: Tom Paine AP/Statoil

Bioastra came up with composite particles that swell up to ten times their original size in liquid. Like materials used for artificial cartilage and occlusive agents for surgery, it is very pliable and can conform to the tiny cracks in the well. “It swells when it interacts with water and heat,” Rajagopalan says.

The four other winners proposed materials ranging from high-tech ceramics to biopolymers and particles that can wedge themselves into the cracks. Hoowaki, based in Pendleton, S.C., developed with Shell an X-shaped ceramic proppant that keeps shale fractures open and reduces settling by 50 percent (see image above). University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC)  in Grand Forks came up with ceramic particles made from a widely available local ore that are 40 percent less dense than current ceramic proppants (see image below). Semplastics of Oviedo, Fla., proposed another heat and crush resistant ceramic material half the density of sand, and Biopolynet of Fredericton, New Brunswick, came up with a fluid additive that allows proppants to better adhere to surfaces.

EERC Senior Research Advisor John Hurley works in the center’s Fuels and Materials Research Laboratory. Image credit: EERC

All of the teams will get a cash prize of $25,000, and will be eligible to receive additional funds from a $375,000 pool for the potential development and commercialization of their ideas after meeting other conditions. “The end game is to develop a diverse portfolio of technologies that help reduce the environmental footprint, while enhancing operation efficiencies,” Lars Hoier, Statoil’s senior vice president for research, development and innovation, said in a press release.

GE’s Gebhardt said that he was eager to move to further testing and development and see how the proposals perform. “It’s exciting and gratifying see the quality of the responses and that many were from industries not related to energy,” Gebhardt said.

GE and Statoil also announced a second challenge focusing on water use in fracking. That challenge remains open until Sept. 24, 2015.

By Tomas Kellner

The acidic bowels of Yellowstone’s hot springs, roiling subsea volcanic vents, and many other deadly and inhospitable places hide colonies of microorganisms that have for centuries eluded scientists. The microbes are now helping researchers shed light on the very beginning of life on Earth, and improve everything from gold extraction and sewage treatment to cancer drugs.

Biologists had long believed that all life evolved from just two types of organisms differentiated by their cells: eukaryotes, creatures like plants and animals whose cells contain a nucleus and membrane-enclosed mitochondria, and bacteria, which have neither mitochondria nor a membrane surrounding their genetic material. But in 1977, American microbiologist Carl Woese discovered that one subset of heat- and salt-tolerant bacteria was actually a “third domain” of life. He called this group archaea.

Scientists now estimate that archaea, which flourish in temperatures approaching 180 degrees Fahrenheit, make up to 20 percent of the Earth’s biomass. But they are only beginning to reveal their secrets.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Technology Sydney’s ithree institute have recently published a paper in the journal Nature, illuminating some of evolution’s early steps 2.5 billion years ago. “Archaea and bacteria joined forces early in evolution, resulting in all other complex life we see around us today,” says Iain Duggin, a researcher at the ithree institute.

Top image: Hot springs like Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring have colonies of heat-loving archaea bacteria living in their bowels. Image credit: Shutterstock Above:  Dr. Iain Duggin

Dr. Duggin and his team studied a strain of salt-tolerant archaea from the Dead Sea. “Contrary to its name, the place is actually teeming with life,” he laughs.

They were looking for similarities between proteins produced by eukaryotes and archaea. “We were retracing steps taken by evolution,” Dr. Duggin says. “We wanted to know why the function of certain proteins was conserved.”

The team identified and then deleted individual genes one by one, and observed what happened. “It’s reverse genetics,” Duggin says. 

They soon noticed that some genes affected the microbe’s ability to control its shape by changing from a disc to a tube. But Dr. Duggin wanted to dig deeper and document the physical changes taking place inside the microbe.

His archaea were tiny, no more than 2 microns across, 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Their innards are basically invisible. The team attacked the problem with the Delta Vision OMX super-resolution microscope from GE Healthcare Life Sciences. The device can observe living organisms in 3D even beyond Ernst Abbe’s diffraction barrier, which for a long time stood as the final frontier for microscopic resolution. “The microscope allowed us to see inside the walls,” Dr. Duggin says. “We were able to resolve details we couldn’t see before.” 

CetZ molecules stick together in a regular pattern to form sheets inside cells. This appears to provide a scaffolding to control cell shape. Remarkably, the overall structure of this sheet is the same in archaeal and human tubulin proteins. Image credit: Dr. Iain Duggin

The team studied the family of proteins, called CetZ, and found that they act  like a miniature skeletal system for the archaea cells to control their shape and movement. This “cytoskeleton” allows the cells to transform themselves from a plate shape into a torpedo-like structure for faster swimming. The research suggests that this feature did not evolve with more complex organisms, but may have been inherited from archaea.

This is not just some idle journey into the past. The team wrote that CetZ is “related to a protein in humans that is the target of several major cancer treatments and, in bacteria, the related protein is crucial for cell division and multiplication.”

The human protein is called tubulin and the bacterial version’s name is FtsZ. “While tubulin is a key target in cancer drug development, we believe that FtsZ could be an important target for the development of new antibiotics, potentially enabling the design of anti-infective drugs that inhibit bacterial cell division and growth, with fewer side effects,” Dr. Duggin says.

The archaeal proteins could also illuminate an even older protein ancestor of the tubulin-FtsZ “superfamily” common to the microbial ancestor of all life, including archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes.

Archaea are most likely one of the oldest life forms on Earth. The organisms can survive in extreme cold, heat and salinity, and exist in the soil, sewage, oceans and even oil wells. They make up an estimated 10 percent of the microbial population found within the human gut and are also responsible for biological methane produced by cattle, a major greenhouse gas.

Professor Ian Charles, director of the ithree institute, said in a news release that it was crucial to better understand the function of archaea in nature, and to potentially exploit their properties for industrial and medical applications. “A new type of potentially useful antibiotic called Archaeocin has recently been described that is derived from the archaea,” Charles said. "Archaea provide an untapped source of novel compounds at a time when alternatives are urgently needed given the rapid rise of resistance to existing antibiotics.“

By Ki Mae Heussner

Over a decade ago, the Human Genome Project gave us the first blueprint of our genetic code, opening the door to a future where medical interventions could be personalized for each patient’s genetic composition. Today, programs like the Human Protein Atlas are zooming in even deeper, mapping out not just the DNA that defines our bodies, but also the building blocks – specifically, the proteins – that make them tick (or sick).

We’ve known for a while that human DNA holds about 20,000 human genes that code for proteins. But it was only late last year that scientists led by Mathias Uhlén of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, published the first comprehensive open-source map of 17,000 human proteins, showing where they are, and how they function in the human body.

Uhlén and his team are now drilling deeper into the data and seeking to analyze the remaining proteins. Their work, aided by super-fast protein purification technology developed by GE Healthcare Life Sciences, could have broad implications, from improving the understanding of human tissue at the molecular level to developing new diagnostic methods and treatments for cancer and other difficult-to-treat diseases.

“The protein is the work horse of the cell and the body,” Uhlén says. “We’ve provided for the first time to the scientific community a comprehensive list of all the proteins which are in the kidney, the brain and [other organs] so you get a descriptive view of the molecular constituents of each cell in the human body.”

Above: Human DNA is made from just four nucleic acids: Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine. Top: Proteins like hemoglobin have extremely complex molecules.

In addition to creating a “periodic table” of the cellular building blocks, their work uncovered several findings related to the distribution of human proteins.

For example, the project has shown that almost half of all proteins are found in all tissues, while very few are unique to any one kind of tissue. That means, Uhlén says, that 30 percent of all drugs used today target proteins that are found in almost every cell in the human body.

“That’s, of course, very interesting and important for the pharmaceutical companies when they’re developing new drugs for new targets,” he says. “[They] can now go to the Protein Atlas and look at where these target proteins are in the human body.”

Beyond that, the Atlas could help advance personalized medicine by providing more information about biomarkers for different diseases. It could give medical researchers a better understanding of cancer since it includes samples from the 20 most common forms of the disease.

Uhlén his team started by identifying all of the 20,000 human genes that code for a protein and then cloning the genes in E.coli bacteria to produce the different proteins.

An illustration of E.coli bacteria. 

The next step involved using GE Healthcare’s ÄKTAexpress protein purification system, which allowed them to purify the individual proteins.

Once purified, Uhlén and team vaccinated animals with the proteins, causing them to make protein-specific antibodies that show up in different tissues and give away a protein’s location in the body. “Our system is a perfect fit for this type of study,” said Jill Simon, Global Product Manager for ÄKTAexpress at GE Healthcare.

Producing and purifying each protein can be a very time-intensive manual process. By using 14 GE Healthcare instruments, Simon and her team estimate GE helped save the Human Protein Atlas more than 23,000 hours – or 2.7 years – of manpower.

Antibodies (blue and yellow) attacking a cancer cell (red).

“This project would have been impossible if we didn’t have the fantastic instruments from GE Healthcare,” Uhlén says. “In order to do this, you need to automate different steps or it gets too expensive. Together with GE Healthcare, we developed an automated way of doing purification of the antibodies which is really working very well.”

Still, antibodies can be tricky to work with, Uhlén says. Sometimes, they help achieve good results, but other times they lead to false positives. Says Uhlén: “We want to clean that up in the next five or six years and, by 2020, have a complete map of where the proteins are in the human body.”

By Tomas Kellner

For most people, Thomas Edison is the man who came up with the first practical light bulb. But Edison was also an inveterate entrepreneur who parlayed his patents into new industries and enduring businesses. Take GE, the result of an 1892 merger between his Edison Electric Co. and Thomson-Houston Electric Co. It has since grown into an industrial giant with $148 billion in annual revenues making everything from MRI scanners to gas turbines and jet engines.

Although these businesses may seem very different, they often trace their origin to a his lab and a point in history where Edison, light and electricity intersect. The light bulb led him into X-rays and the medical imaging business, and GE’s expertise in power generation and gas turbine engineering gave birth to the company’s aviation business. (This sharing is a two-way street. Aviation engineers are now helping their colleagues in power generation help build more efficient gas turbines with their jet engine know-how.)

It’s in part because of these synergies - GE executives call this cross-pollination “the GE store” – that GE Power & Water and GE Aviation alone produced a combined $50 billion in revenues in 2014, more than a third of the company’s total. Take a look at their intertwined history.

Top image: A GEnx engine for the Dreamliner. GE Aviation has its roots inside a power plant. Image credit: Adam Senatori/GE Reports

Edison’s light bulb and the wave of electric devices that followed created a huge demand for electricity. Initially, companies were using piston engines to power generators, but they quickly switched to more efficient steam turbines. In 1903, GE engineers Charles Curtis and William Emmet built what was then the world’s most powerful steam turbine generator for a power plant in Newport, R.I. (see above). It required one-tenth the space and cost two-thirds less than the equivalent piston engine generator.

It was also in 1903 that GE hired young turbine engineer Sanford Moss (above). Moss had just received a doctorate in gas turbine research from Cornell University. At GE, he started building a revolutionary radial gas compressor using the centrifugal force to squeeze the air before it enters the gas turbine - the same force pushing riders up into the air on a swing carousel.

Moss’s early experiments failed; his machine guzzled too much fuel and produced too little power. But his patent and his revolutionary compressor design were sound and found many applications: from supplying air to blast furnaces to powering pneumatic tube systems. He didn’t know it, but he had pointed the way to the jet engine before the Wright Brothers even took off.

In November 1917 – at the peak of World War I - GE President E.W. Rice received a note from National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA, asking about Moss’s radial compressor. WWI was the first conflict that involved planes and the agency wanted Moss to improve the performance of the Liberty aircraft engine. The engine was rated 354 horsepower at sea level, but its output dropped by half in thin air at high altitudes. Moss (right in the picure above) believed that he could use his compressor to squeeze the air before it enters the engine, making it denser and recovering the engine’s lost power.

Using a mechanical device to fill the cylinders of a piston engine with more air than it would typically ingest is called supercharging. Moss designed a turbosupercharger that used the hot exhaust coming from the Liberty engine to spin his radial turbine and squeeze the air coming inside the engine. In 1918, when he tested the design at 14,000 feet on top of Pike’s Peak, Colo. The engine delivered 352 horsepower, essentially its rated sea level output, and GE entered the aviation business.

The first Le Pere biplane powered by a turbosupercharged Liberty engine took off on July 12, 1919. “The General Electric superchargers thus far constructed have been designed to give sea-level absolute pressure at an altitude of 18,000 feet, which involves a compressor that doubles the absolute pressure of the air,” Moss wrote.

Planes equipped with Moss’s turbosupercharger set several world altitude records.

In 1937, on the eve of World War II, GE received a large order from the Army Air Corps to build turbosuperchargers for Boeing B-17 and Consolidated B-24 bombers, P-38 fighter planes, Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, and other planes. GE opened a dedicated Supercharger Department at Lynn, Mass. In 1939, Moss proposed to build one of the first turboprop engines. Trained as a gas turbine engineer, he later joined the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

But GE’s aviation business was just getting started. In 1941, the U.S. government asked GE to bring to production one of the first jet engines developed in England by Sir Frank Whittle. (He was knighted for his feat.) A group of GE engineers called the Hush Hush Boys designed new parts for the engine, redesigned others, tested it and delivered a top-secret working prototype called I-A. On October 1, 1942, the first American jet plane, the Bell XP-59A, took off from Lake Muroc in California for a short flight. The jet age in the U.S. had begun.

The demand for the first jet engines, called J33 and J35, was so high that GE had a hard a time meeting production numbers and the Army outsourced manufacturing to General Motors and Allison.

GE decided to double down and invest in more jet engine research. The J33 and J35 engines used a radial - also called centrifugal - turbine to compress air, similar to the design that Moss developed for his turbosuperchargers. But GE engineers started working on an engine with an axial turbine that pushed air through the engine along its axis. (All jet engines use this design today.) The result was the J47 jet engine that powered everything from fighter jets like the F-86 Sabre to the giant Convair B-36 strategic bombers. GE made 35,000 J47 engines, making it the most produced jet engine in history.

The J47 also found several off-label applications. The Spirit of America jet car used one, and a pair of them powered what is still the world’s fastest jet-propelled train. They also served on the railroad as heavy-duty snow blowers.

In 1948, GE hired German war refugee and aviation pioneer Gerhard Neumann, who quickly went to work on improving the jet engine. He came up with a revolutionary innovation called the variable stator. It allowed pilots to change the pressure inside the turbine and make planes routinely fly faster than the speed of sound. When GE started testing the first jet engine with Neumann’s variable stator, the J79 (see below), engineers thought that their instruments were malfunctioning because of the amount of power it produced. In the 1960s, a GE-powered XB-70 Valkyrie aircraft was flying in excess of Mach 3, three times the speed of sound.

The improved performance made the aviation engineers realize that their variable vanes and other design innovations could also make power plants more efficient.

Converting the engines for land use wasn’t difficult. In 1959, they turned a T58 helicopter engine into a turbine that produced 1,000 horsepower and could be used for generating electricity on land and on boats. A similar machine built around the J79 jet generated 15,000 horsepower. In Cincinnati, where GE Aviation moved from Lynn in teh 1950s, the local utility built a ring of 10 J79 jet engines to power a big electricity generator.

The first major application of such turbines, which GE calls “aeroderivatives” because of their aviation heritage, was as power plants for the Navy’s 76,000-ton Spruance-class destroyers. The turbines now also power the world’s fastest passenger ship, Francisco. It can carry 1,000 passengers, 150 cars and travel at 58 knots

Today, there are thousands of aeroderivatives working all over the world. Most recently, they have been helping Egypt’s growing economy slake its thirst for electricity.

Neumann’s variable vanes (above) are also part of GE’s most advanced gas turbine: the 9HA Harriet, the world’s largest, most powerful and most efficient gas turbine. Two of them can generate the same amount of power as a small nuclear power plant.

At the same time, GE Aviation is working on the next-generation jet engine called ADVENT, or Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology (above). “To put it simply, the adaptive cycle engine is a new architecture that takes the best of a commercial engine and combines it with the best of a fighter engine,” says Jed Cox, who leads the ADVENT project for the U.S. Air Force Research Lab.

By Matthew Van Dusen

Feature by feature, they revealed themselves: the plains of Sputnik, the Norgay Montes and the vast and forbidding Cthulu Regio.

When the New Horizons spacecraft finally buzzed Pluto at roughly 30,000 mph on July 14, it sent back snaps of an untamed land of craterless plains and jagged ice mountains beyond our imagining. And those pictures of the dwarf planet traveled the expanse of space thanks to a 125-pound power plant that doesn’t know the meaning of quit.

It’s called the RTG, or Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.

Originally designed by GE’s Space Division (now part of Lockheed Martin) in King of Prussia, Penn., this model of RTG has powered U.S. spacecraft since the Ulysses probe was launched in 1990. The electricity from the RTG doesn’t propel the spacecraft, which use inertia from the launch and gravity slingshots around planets, but it’s necessary for the missions to snap pics, gather data and phone home.

Above: An artist’s rendition of the New Horizon spacecraft approaching Pluto’s moon Charon. Pluto is in the Background. Image credit: Getty Images Top: Pluto photographed by New Horizons on July 13, 2015. Image credit: NASA

The RTG takes advantage of the predictable decay of Plutonium 238, a radioisotope produced by certain nuclear power plants. The heat given off by the plutonium, which is in the form of 18 fire-resistant ceramic pellets, is transformed into electricity by a process known as the Seebeck effect.

Discovered by the 19th century German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck, the effect describes how heat can be turned into electricity when two different conductive materials in a closed circuit called a thermocouple are kept at different temperatures. In a spacecraft, this means that the “hot” junction absorbs the heat from the plutonium while the “cold” junction is kept frigid by the near-absolute zero of space. The temperature difference between the two junctions results in an electrical current.

The internal heat source is necessary in space, where the sun’s energy is too weak to power solar panels. The RTG provided about 250 watts of power when New Horizons launched in 2006. But the device loses 5 percent of its power every four years and outputs about 200 watts currently.

GE was a critical part of the space race from its earliest days, working on computers, lunar landing modules, moonboots and even astronaut escape pods. But the RTGs were the most lasting contribution. The older model RTGs GE engineered for the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are still providing power for the craft, which have made it further from home than any manmade object in history.

The production of the thermocouples was stopped after the Voyager program in the 1970s sand GE had to kickstart it for the Galileo missions. The new model RTG, called a GPHS, or general-purpose heat source, used a different method to pack the plutonium fuel than the Voyager craft.

GE got out of the space business altogether in 1992. The company would still probably honor any service obligations, but the product is now a bit out of reach.

By Connolly Jurkiewicz

But better imaging doesn’t benefit just patients. It also gives us a clearer picture of the past and future. With a CT scan, for example, you can discover what a 3,000-year-old mummy ate based on its bone density. Using a super resolution microscope, you can watch the HIV virus jump from cell to cell. An ultrasound machine can now allow you to watch your child’s facial expressions before it’s even born. Take a look at the images below to see how these healthcare machines are bringing to light the inner workings of the human body.

Top and above: These images of the skull and the vessels and arteries that supply the brain with blood were taken by the superfast Revolution CT machine. Image credit: GE Healthcare

Doctors use ultrasound technology to study organs and functions of the fetus like the structure of the brain and the working of the heart. GIF credit: GE Healthcare

Doctors call the super-resolution DeltaVision OMX microscope “OMG” because the images it can take. Above an image of a dividing cell. Image credit: Jane Stout, Indiana University

A new software for ultrasound scanning called cSound allows doctors to observe the heart in 3D. “It’s like opening the chest and seeing the heart beating,” says cardiologist Bijoy Khandheria..

GE has been making X-ray tubes for more than a century. Scientists used them to study mummies at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Image credit: New York Public Library

Cytell is an intuitive and relatively inexpensive imaging system that fits on a lab bench and allows researchers to quickly analyze and visualize routine samples, from insect limbs down to cells. Above is an image of lingual papillae, the hair-like structures located on the top of the tongue. Image credit: Gary Sarkis, GE Healthcare Life Sciences

Last year, GE Healthcare celebrated the International Day of Radiology by scanning 100 everyday objects. Here’s an MRI image of cauliflower. Image credit: GE Healthcare

By Zack Lord

Scientists at GE Global Research spent the last four years building a more efficient wind turbine. The result rises 450-feet above the Mojave desert in California – almost half the height of the Eiffel Tower — and looks like it has a silver UFO stuck to its face. It may appear strange, but you are looking at the future of wind power. The team explains how it came about.

In 2011, Mark Little, GE’s chief technology officer and the head of the GRC, challenged principal engineer Seyed Saddoughi and his team to build a rotor that could harvest more wind. Michael Idelchik, who runs advanced technology programs at the GRC, gave them another clue: “Since we know that the inner parts of wind turbines don’t do much for energy capture, why don’t we change the design?”

The team came up with the idea of putting a hemisphere on the center part of the wind turbine to redirect the incoming wind towards the outer parts of the blades. “The biggest unknown for us was what size the dome should be,” Saddoughi says.

The group decided to do some experiments. They bought on the Internet a 10-inch wind turbine and a bunch of Styrofoam balls of different sizes, then took the lot to a wind tunnel at GE’s aerodynamic lab (see above). “By cutting the Styrofoam balls in half, we created our domes of different sizes and then stuck these domes on the center of the small wind turbine and ran our experiments at different tunnel air speeds,” Saddoughi says.

The team hooked up the turbine to their instruments and measured the amount of voltage it produced. “Invariably we got a jump in voltage output with the dome placed at the center of the wind turbine; albeit the increases differed for different size domes,” Saddoughi says.

The scientists reached out to a colleague who did simple computer simulations for them and confirmed that even a full-size turbine was more efficient with a nose upfront. “Of course overjoyed by the very limited experimental and computational results, we wanted to come up with a name for this design, such that it really represented the idea – and was also something that everybody would remember easily,” Saddoughi says. “The team gathered in my office again, and after an hour of playing with words the name Energy Capture Optimization by Revolutionary Onboard Turbine Reshape (ecoROTR) was created.”

Above: Saddoughi is attaching differently shaped noses and turbine blades in Stuttgart. All image credits: GE Global Research and Chris New (ecoROTR)

The team then built a 2-meter rotor model of the turbine and took it for testing to a large wind tunnel in Stuttgart, Germany. The tunnel was 6.3 meters in diameters and it allowed them to dramatically reduce the wall effects on the performance.

The researchers spent couple of months working in Stuttgart. “We conducted a significant number of experiments at the Gust wind tunnel for different tunnel air velocities and wind turbine tip-speed ratios with several variations of domes,” Saddoughi says. “The wind tunnel was also operated at its maximum speed for the blades in feathered configurations at several yaw angles of the turbine to simulate gust conditions.” They ran the turbine as fast as 1,000 rpm and carried out surface dye flow visualization experiments (see below).

Above: When dye hits the fan. Saddoughi after the dye flow visualization.

When they came back in the second half on 2012, they started designing the actual prototype of the dome that was 20 meters in diameter and weighed 20 tons. The size presented a new batch of challenges. “Unlike gas or steam turbines that are designed to operate under a relatively limited number of set conditions, wind turbines must operate reliably and safely under literally hundreds of conditions, many of them highly transient,” says Norman Turnquist, senior principal engineer for aero thermal and mechanical systems.

They ran more calculations to make sure that GE’s 1.7-megawatt test turbine in Tehachapi, Calif., would be able to support the dome. They looked at performance during different wind speed and directions, storms and gusts. They also designed special mounting adapters and brackets to attach the dome. “The design looked really strange, but it made a lot of sense,” says Mike Bowman, the leader of sustainable energy projects at GE Global Research.

The team then assembled the dome on site. “Early on, it was decided that the prototype dome would be a geodesic construction,” Turnquist says. “The reason is simply that it was the construction method that required the least amount of unknown risk.”

For safety reasons, the workers assembled the dome about 300m from the turbine and used a giant crane to move it to the turbine base for installation. But there was a hitch. “After the adapters were mounted to the hub it was discovered that bolt circle diameter was approximately 8mm too small to fit the dome,” Turnquist says. The team had to make custom shims to make it work.

The dome went up in May on Memorial Day and the turbine is currently powering through four months of testing. “This is the pinnacle of wind power,” says Mike Bowman. “As far as I know, there’s nothing like this in the world. This could be a game changer.“

By Tomas Kellner

Tomas Kellner: How do you shoot a large object like a locomotive that is moving very fast in and out of frame?

Vincent Laforet: Trying to photograph a moving train is either extremely easy or extremely difficult. There’s nothing in between. Trying to get a helicopter to fly in tandem with a massive locomotive followed by a dozen cars is a little bit of a feat. But with the right team members and the right kind of attitude, we were able to pull it off very nicely. We also had a lot of concerns about weather since we were shooting towards the end of the winter.

TK: The sunrises and sunsets in the pictures are gorgeous. It seems like the weather played along.

VL: We actually had to pull the shoot back one day early, which made it very difficult for our team because we had a shoot the night prior in New York, so it was a very compressed schedule. But we were lucky because the next day there was an incredible snowstorm; the sky was all white and full of snow.

TK: The locomotive looks almost like a toy in your pictures. Why did you choose that effect?

VL: Whenever I get an assignment, I try to get to the bottom of what it’s about. In this case, I remembered what it was like being a little child playing with train sets. That’s one of my first memories. As a teenager, an entire table in our basement was filled with a train set. I tried to do my best to capture that sense of wonder.

Because when you’re in the real world, with adults, you see the scale of the locomotives and see what they do and how they are important for moving goods and the economy. But when you’re a kid, you’re in awe of something like a train that effortlessly wanders across the tracks in circles. I found it absolutely meditative to sit back and watch that movement. As a photographer, I’m trying to dial into those memories, those ideals, and capture that.

Laforet still photographs New York City. Above is the Chrysler Building.

TK: When did you start taking pictures?

VL: My father was a photographer. When I was 15, I picked up the camera and haven’t put it down ever since. My favorite first memory is walking with it through NYC with a few rolls of film in my pocket and feeling the sense of discovery.

TK: You succeeded. From above, the Pueblo test track does look like a giant train set. What were some of you other ideas for the shoot?

VL: We thought of several ways of photographing the train, including one with a cherry picker. The problem is that you can’t get much variety, you can’t move it around, and the terrain didn’t work either. The helicopter was the best choice.

Above: The helicopter got so close that it blew tumbleweed in the train’s path.

TK: I’ve been on helicopter and it’s usually pretty bumpy. How did you keep you camera still?

VL: We’re used to shooting at night and at high altitude with a gyroscope. It’s our specialty. This assignment was actually very smooth, there was very little wind and we had a phenomenal pilot. I would describe the helicopter as a magic carpet ride. With the right pilot in the right situation, it’s actually extremely smooth and relaxing. Having a train that moves at a predictable speed on a predictable path is the best-case scenario you can ask for.

We took off early in the morning dusk, before sunrise. At that point we had gyros to stabilize both cameras. They eliminate most of the vibration from the helicopter. That’s how you able to see some of those images, in one you can actually see the headlights of the train, which is pretty cool.

I got rid of the gyros as soon as I could because they’re pretty heavy and cumbersome and went straight to handheld. And that’s where I was able to do the longer zoom stuff from the higher altitude.

Helicopter image credit: Chris New

TK: Were there any other challenges?

VL: The problem with using the helicopter was that the train was not tall. You’ve got to get the helicopter quite low to make it be in the forefront of the frame. So we needed to do some scouting to make sure that it was safe to fly low. If there were tables or antennas or any sort of problems, we were not going to take the risk of having an accident. We found several parts of the track that were actually ideal for flying very low and being able to land immediately, should anything happen.

TK: The light looks stunning in the pictures. How do you choose your schedule?

VL: I’ve been doing this for 25 years. We figured out where the Rockies were in the frame, where the light would most likely be coming from. Everything worked, it was pretty effortless, just fun. So much so that I was able to go up toward the very end of the shoot and take some of my favorite images where it was looking straight down at the geometry of the tracks.

TK: That’s your train set image.

VL: You don’t often get to do that. It’s a question of time, a question of mindset. You are usually so busy trying to get the basic photographs because of all the other challenges. The fact that the shoot went so smoothly allowed me to experiment and go very high. We were already at a high altitude in Pueblo, Co. (elev. 4,700 feet). So I think we flew above 10,000 feet to shoot those series of images. I’ve learned that as a photographer I only make those images when I am very relaxed. And this shoot allowed for that.

Above: An aerial image of the Empire State Building with a fisheye lens.

TK: Was it a GE helicopter?

VL: I’ve been specializing on aerial photography for the last ten years. We always do a lot of research before we charter a helicopter and we know who the pilots are. I’ve been flying with my assistant Mike Isler for a decade. He’s also a helicopter pilot and we’re photographing major cities at night from a high altitude. More than 40 million people have seen the photos.

TK: Now what type of camera are you using?

VL: We shot this with a prototype camera, the Canon 5DS, so GE was actually, to my knowledge, the first commercial assignment in the United States at least, and possibly anywhere to have been shot with a Canon 5DS, a 50 megapixel camera.

Above: New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

TK: In some pictures you make parts of the locomotive appear blurry. Were you using a special lens?

VL: That’s a technique that I revived about a decade ago. It’s been around forever but wasn’t very popular. But then in 2006, I shot a series of tilt-shift images, basically rotating the front lens element up and down and making everything above or below the center gout of focus (see above). The visual effect makes everything look like a miniature, the entire world looks like a miniature, even a 200-ton locomotive.

TK: This sort of brings you back to your basement.

VL: It’s the full circle thing.

Above. A night image of London’s Tower Bridge from Laforet’s latest project, Air. All images by Vincent Laforet except where noted

By Tomas Kellner

Two years ago, scientists at the GE Global Research labs (GRC) in upstate New York found a futuristic way to fix things: blowing metal powder, at four times the speed of sound, onto parts in need of service. “The tiny bits of material fly so fast then they essentially fuse together when they hit the target,” says Gregorio Dimagli, materials scientist from Avio Aero. “Unlike welding, you don’t need to apply heat to make them stick. The bond happens on the atomic level. That’s why we are so excited.”

This is a big deal. The method, called cold spray, will allow Avio Aero and its parent, GE Aviation, to repair turbine and compressor blades without changing their highly complex underlying crystal structure. “Manufacturers spend a lot of time to make the part just right,” Dimagli says. “But when you heat up metal and then cool it again, it changes in the same way powder snow can become a sheet of ice after a warm spell.”

Dimagli and his team just partnered with the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, to perfect the applications of cold spray, sometimes also called “3D painting,” as well as laser deposition and other additive manufacturing techniques.

Top: Unlike traditional manufacturing, which removes material to achieve the final shape, most additive methods build parts from the ground up. This GIF captures particles leaving the cold spray nozzle at four times the speed of sound and hitting their target. The image was slowed down by using a camera capable of shooting 10,000 frames per second. Above: GE reached out to the Slo Mo Guys to explain cold spray. GIF credit: GE Global Research.

The new lab will employ three Avio Aero scientists and six researchers from the university. They will use thermography and other scientific disciplines to look for the best applications of the new methods.

Anteneh Kebbede, manager of the Coatings and Surface Lab at the GRC that helped developed cold spray, says the technology is “like a fountain of youth for machine parts.”

3D painting deposits metal powder flying at velocities of up to Mach 4 on precise models to produce and repair jet engine blades, rotors and other components without resorting to machining or welding.

He says the method can build whole new parts with walls as thick as one inch or more. “For manufacturers the potential benefits are enormous,” Kebbede says. “Imagine being able to restore an aging part to its original condition with a tool that looks like spray gun.”

The 3D painting gun uses pressurized carrier gas zipping through a de Laval nozzle to accelerate powder particles as small as 5 microns to supersonic velocities. The speed causes localized high energy collisions when the particles hit the surface, the micro version of bullets hitting a steel bar. “Powder particles slam into the surface and form a diffusion bond with the part,” Kebbede says.

Cold spray operators are using a computer-controlled robot to manipulate the gun. Like 3D printers, the computer works with a 3D image of the part. Engineers program the robot so that it moves in an optimal way to deposit the powder. “All the hard work is in the details,” Kebbede says. “The powder selection, the conditions the powder experiences in the gun, the speed of the gun, the gun distance from the part and its angle relative to the part are just some of the inputs that lead to a good bond. That’s the trick. The same process that can cause build up can also cause erosion.”

Dimagli says that possible applications range anywhere from heavy-duty gear boxes for oil and gas machinery, to gas turbine rotors and jet engine blades. “These methods are the future,” he says. “Compared to what we are using now, you get better quality for less money and you are also done faster.”

By Mark Egan

John Lammas sees his handiwork all over the place. At the airport, he can gaze out at a taxiing plane and think, “I worked on that fan blade.” Passing by a power-generation plant, he can say to himself, “I worked on the turbines inside.”

The English engineer’s diverse and impressive 30-year career at GE, where he’s worked on jet engines, gas turbines and in the oil and gas business, is no accident. GE routinely shifts talent like Lammas around the company. The idea is to foster innovation by sharing ideas and pooling expertise from different fields, a knowledge crossover called the “GE Store.” Using compressor technology from jet engines in gas turbines is one example, but the concept ranges from CT scanners being used in oil pipelines to ultrasounds working as sensors in factories.

Top: GE Store cross-business synergy illustrated with turbine blades. Above: Lammas (at left) stands in front of the 9F.03 gas turbine. Image credit: GE Power & Water. 

When he joined the GE Aviation team in Cincinnati, Lammas went to work engineering the variable stator vane (VSV) system – a piece of technology invented in the 1950s by GE to make engines go twice the speed of sound. Lammas was working on a later version for the CFM56, the world’s best-selling aircraft engine powering the Boeing 737 fleet and many other planes.

Assembling the VSV system’s actuating rings involved intricate engineering. Vanes had variable positions based on the engine’s speed and workers adjusted each link, locking parts in sequence. The finicky work slowed production.

Lammas brought an outsider’s perspective. “I looked at it and wondered why were they doing this? I asked if we could simplify and standardize the process,” he recalls. “Everyone thought I was crazy.”

But tests found that using a machine to preset vanes actually produced better results and cut assembly costs. For Lammas the lessons were clear: fresh perspectives facilitate innovation and testing the status quo was worthwhile.

Lammas could stay close to his vanes because GE empowered engineers to guide projects through their complete lifecycles. “GE gave you a great opportunity to see every element of what you designed and how it operated in machines,” Lammas says. “You were left to your own devices to take on as much responsibility as you wanted.”

The GE90, the world’s largest turbofan engine, thanks in part to the work of John Lammas. Image credit: General Electric. 

For the next 22 years, Lammas worked at the center of some of GE Aviation’s signature projects. He helped create the world’s largest turbofan engine, the GE90, which powers the Boeing 777 and led to the GEnx engine for the Dreamliner (he worked on that one too). Then, in 2007, after nearly 30 years of engineering jet engines, Lammas was asked again by GE to deploy his outsider’s perspective, this time at GE Power & Water.

Vexed by stubborn problems with power generation compressors, the company wanted outside expertise, Lammas recalls. So he made the move to become the Chief Engineer for the business and worked on fixing some legacy F-Class challenges and engineering a new gas turbine, the 7F.05, designed for utility-scale power generation. Like jet engines, they use powerful turbines, compressors and even VSVs, Lammas’ first work assignment. They’re just much larger.

An employee inspects the compressor section of a GE 7F.05 turbine. Image credit: GE Reports

“There was some nervousness about designing a new compressor for the 7F.05 machine,” he says. “Having someone with an aviation background gave the business the confidence to go ahead.”

The undertaking was a success. Lammas and his team engineered the 7F.05 to use less fuel and produce fewer emissions than earlier gas turbines.

Since then, Lammas has spent time at yet another GE business: Oil and Gas. The unit had grown through mergers and acquisitions and Lammas was sent in to impart GE’s engineering culture. More recently, he returned to Power Generation to help develop GE’s HA turbines, the world’s largest and most efficient of their ilk.

Lammas, made a GE Officer in 2010 as an Engineering Vice President, still loves his craft. He says he still sometimes wakes at night puzzling over issues seen during testing or new technologies for GE’s next generation of heavy gas turbines.

He’s also excited about a new advanced manufacturing plant GE’s building in Greenville, S.C. It will be equipped with 3D printers, among other machines, and will allow his team to develop prototypes faster than before.

“Making things is cool again,” he says.

If you live in a house, one of the most amazing materials known to humans is likely languishing in a dark corner of your basement. Spider webs and especially the draglines that form their structure are made from silk threads extruded by arachnids that can be several times tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel by weight, but also extremely stretchy. Spider silk also has anti-bacterial properties, which may have led Greek and Roman soldiers to use it as wound dressing.

The idea of farming spiders for their silk, however, sounds like a nightmare in more ways than one. “Spiders are very difficult to farm,” observed the BBC. “They are predatory and will readily resort to cannibalism in the absence of other prey.”

Top image: Bundling several silk threads together can yield tough fibers of many shapes that are as strong as the tendons of mammals. Above: Researchers can whip a solution of Spiber spider silk into a fluffy foam, just like working with milk. But the foam remains solid even when immersed in solvents or sterilized with heat. Credits: Spiber Technologies

But in 2002, a group of Canadian scientists came up with a terrific new idea. They transplanted spider genes coding for dragline silk proteins into goat cells, which expressed the silk in the goat’s milk.

Scientists have since proven that harvesting spider silk proteins from goat’s milk works. But a new crop of companies working to commercialize synthetic spider silk, such as Sweden’s Spiber Technologies AB, are moving beyond “spider goats.”

Image credit: Spiber Technologies

The Stockholm-based biomaterials company is using genetically engineered bacteria and GE protein purification technology to produce large quantities of the so-called spidroin proteins found in dragline silk, and then customize them for a variety of specific purposes.“Man-made spider silk can be adjusted to contain specific parts that bind to cells and promote wound healing, thereby enabling use within fields of tissue engineering, diagnostics and cell culture,” says Kristina Martinell, Spiber’s production director. “In short, it’s a tailor-made biomaterial.”

The team at Spiber starts by selecting a portion of the gene sequence spiders use to express spidroin. They clone the genes into E. coli bacteria (see below), rather than goats, and grow the microbes in a bioreactor. Next they use a protein purification system developed by GE Healthcare Life Sciences to purify the proteins for medical use and other life sciences applications.

Image credit: Spiber Technologies

Spiber’s product development is similar to the process faced by pharmaceutical companies, Martinell says. The team had to scale hurdles such as learning to manage the “stickiness” of spider silk protein. “This protein, in its nature is a bit sticky,” she explains. “It has to be treated very carefully according to a specific method.”

Back in 2011, when Spiber and GE started working together, GE got a chance to test the technology on Spiber’s new sample of proteins, and Spiber used it to evaluate the process. “As a small company, we are excited to have access to GE’s equipment and promising knowledge,” Martinell says.

A drop of liquid containing Spiber protein solidifies into a transparent layer on the surface of plastic or glass labware. The resulting film can be peeled off as a sheet. Image credit: Spiber Technologies

Over time, the company’s technique has evolved to keep the material soluble until it is ready to be shaped into the arrangements needed for various applications

Spiber can now manufacture spider silk fiber, film, foam and even mesh. The company says that the material is as strong as mammalian tendons and remains stable at boiling temperatures of up to 267 degrees Celsius (512 Fahrenheit).

As a result, the range of potential products is huge.  The company is working to apply spider silk in several medical fields, including cardiology, heart tissue regeneration, bone reconstruction, skin cell growth and vaccines.

Who’s to say that we won’t be able to engineer a certain superhero one day.

By Kristin Kloberdanz

It’s an endless headache, a migraine really, for American health organizations and patients alike: claims for treatment denied by insurance companies, causing endless frustrating phone calls to get payment disputes resolved. Now, thanks to an innovation made across multiple GE businesses, relief could be at hand.

The aptly named DenialsIQ™ debuted at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Chicago earlier this year. The software, developed by GE Healthcare, uses advanced analytics to help health systems find claims that were initially denied by insurance companies.

At the core of the system is a patent-pending statistical algorithm that analyzes denials.

DenialsIQ harnesses big data to streamline healthcare information to find claims that were initially denied by insurance companies. 

Health systems and patients both benefit. The former can help ensure they are receiving their payments accurately and the latter live with less stress.

DenialsIQ is also an example of what company executives call the GE Store — the sharing of ideas and expertise between GE’s businesses that make the combined company more valuable than the sum of its parts. That’s because ideas and insights that drive the software came from GE’s aviation, capital and healthcare IT businesses.

The innovator who put the disparate insights together was Marc Edgar, an information scientist at GE Global Research in Niskauyna, New York.

Since Edgar joined GE in 1994, he has harnessed data to improve the design and efficiency of jet engines, wind turbines, power plants and medical equipment.

The software picks out trends in claims denials, enabling healthcare professionals to spot patterns and manage claims more efficiently.

DenialsIQ first came to him while he was working with GE Aviation to improve the performance and manufacturing quality of aircraft engines.  “The core of the DenialsIQ algorithm actually goes back to GE’s Six Sigma thinking about the causes of variation and defects,” Edgar says.

He wanted to find a way to analyze the reams of manufacturing data, but humans only get the answers to the questions they think to ask. Modern computing, however, can model hundreds of billions of scenarios and hypotheses and ask the right questions to uncover the most interesting and actionable items, he said. That was the first piece of the puzzle.

Then, when he was working with GE Capital, Edgar learned that how we process financial payment transactions for healthcare providers often contained “defects,” just like the manufacturing process in aviation.

The idea finally came together when Edgar started working in 2012 with GE’s healthcare IT team on solving problems around customer expenditures. In 2013, he visited a New York hospital and witnessed a “cafeteria-sized room full of people” working to resolve denials between the health organization and insurance companies. “There has to be a better way,” he remembers thinking.

Big data is tough to process when medical records look like this. 

Edgar took sample data sets from a number of healthcare institutions and developed an algorithm to spot patterns in the data that his team could identify as problematic. He took the algorithm to the Healthcare IT team and offered it as a solution to denials processing. “We knew if we could improve that process, it would mean a lot to the financial performance of a healthcare provider.”

DenialsIQ, which officially launched in July, identifies a common pattern in denials, and isolates where the problem is and its root cause. “The value of this algorithm is a game changer for customers,” says Andrew Slotnick, senior manager for product marketing at GE Healthcare’s Clinical Business Solutions unit. “This tool allows you to visualize patterns and drill down on certain types of denials that are most actionable.”

Once a company learns the pattern in their denied claims, they can then rework them in order to get paid. They can also spot and fix problems internally to avoid a repeat.

Edgar said the DenialsIQ algorithm is now being tested in other businesses across GE to identify the root causes of software bugs, problems with financial charges and manufacturing quality issues.

DenialsIQ was built on Predix, GE’s cloud-based platform for collaborating on projects involving big data, and shaped using FastWorks — GE’s approach to building lean start-ups and prototypes, using the agile method of iterative “sprints” of work among collaborating teams.

Customers are paying attention. WESTMED Practice Partners, Orlando Health and UC Irvine gave it a test run and GE found it could surface patterns in up to 80 percent of the total denied claims, and roughly one in every three of those denials are in patterns that had money that could be recovered or an action that could be taken to avoid similar denials in the future. GE Healthcare IT President and Chief Executive Officer Jan de Witte called it a “beautiful application.”

“It took a long time for all of the technical parts of DenialsIQ to incubate and come together,” said Edgar, who enjoys studying 18^th century colonial life, including reading and reprinting 18^th century newspapers, when he is not working on cutting-edge technology. “My experiences (over the years) informed it.”

By Erica Firmo

Fabiana Garcia is no Indiana Jones. But that didn’t stop her from packing her backpack with high-tech wireless medical equipment, grabbing her tent, boarding a Brazilian military plane and flying to a remote community deep inside the Amazon jungle a few weeks ago.

Garcia is a GE Healthcare employee and a member of Brazilian Health Expeditions, a local non-profit group that sends out doctors, nurses and other volunteers to some of Brazil’s most remote locations to provide free medical care to native tribes. On her latest expedition she traveled deep inside the Amazon to work with a Yanomami tribe that, for thousands of years, have lived (and still do) a semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Top: Dental health education in action. Above: Fabiana Garcia, GE employee and volunteer with Brazilian Health Expeditions.

Dr. Ricardo Ferreira, an orthopedic surgeon, founded Brazilian Health Expeditions in 2003, after travelling to the Amazon jungle and encountering members of the Yanomami tribe. “I found myself in the middle of nowhere with no one but a group of amazing people that truly needed me. I knew I could help them, and that’s how I started the medical mission of my life” he said.

A volunteer doctor uses a Vscan with Dual Probe during patient triage.

For Dr. Ferreira, the experience is about more than providing medical care to a remote area. “It’s also about respecting the forest and traditions of patients and their families; this is what making a difference means.”

Like Dr. Ferreira, Garcia had also traveled to the Amazon on medical missions before. This time around, she brought a Vscan with Dual Probe*, a one-of-a kind portable ultrasound device developed by GE Healthcare.  

“The device can fits in a pocket and helps doctors provide immediate care. It can also help surgeons visualize needle placement prior to administering anesthesia. The portable device gives doctors additional information to arrive at a prognoses without having to transfer patients long distances to the nearest hospital,” says Garcia.

Brazilian Health Expeditions’ goal is to guarantee quality health care to the country’s most remote communities and devices such as the Vscan with Dual Probe help them do that. Since 2003, volunteers have cared for more than 30,000 indigenous people from 54 distinct ethnic groups. Each of their medical expeditions is supported by a mobile tent, a field hospital of sorts, that includes advanced medical equipment to perform general clinical exams and also in ophthalmology, pediatrics, dentistry, gynecology, as well as minor surgeries such as cataract and hernia repairs.

More than 50 volunteers joined Garcia on this latest expedition. Doctors and surgeons performed 2,863 clinical exams and 239 surgeries. “This was our 33rd expedition and the weather was very warm, so some of us slept in hammocks. We would wake up very early each morning, go to the river to take a bath like the natives and then go straight to the medical tent to run a day full of activities,” she said.

These field hospitals literally save lives, explains Garcia. She recalls that three days before the group arrived at the Yanomami village, a 7-year-old girl badly injured her hand while helping her mother prepare cassava flour. “There was no surgery center nearby, so this little girl was bleeding for days without proper care,” Garcia explained.

But as soon as the volunteers found the girl, they sent her straight to the surgery tent to perform an emergency repair procedure, which prevented her from losing movement in her hand. “Without us, the alternative was a four day trip to the nearest hospital,” commented Garcia.