It might seem like a cushy job to be the man or woman who works out of the carpeted offices of a power plant, coordinating field service crews who traipse out into the elements to fix, say, an idled wind turbine. But it’s far from elementary. “It’s still a judgment call,” says Scott Berg, chief operating officer of ServiceMax from GE Digital. “Dispatchers probably can’t consider all the historic factors and track record of the individual. Your ability to dispatch might be dependent on your personal knowledge of 20 people.”

But starting this year, artificial intelligence will help make some of those decisions less complex. “We call it intelligent dispatching,” Berg says.

ServiceMax leads the global industry of field service management software — an estimated $25 billion market worldwide. The ServiceMax research team is now developing algorithms that will help dispatchers pick the right repair person by scanning each individual’s work history and predicting which technician would be the quickest and most reliable at a particular task.

The new AI-driven suggestions will offer details that most people wouldn’t be able to remember, never mind calculate together with all the other parameters to consider, such as a field worker’s skill set, time available and distance to the site. “We’re running a proof of concept now,” Berg says.

Top and above: ServiceMax is developing algorithms that will help dispatchers pick the right repair person by scanning each individual’s work history and predicting which technician would be the quickest and most reliable at a particular task. Images credit: GE Power.

GE acquired ServiceMax in 2016, and the company counts Schneider Electric and Tyco, for example, as clients. ServiceMax opened for business in 1999 as a consulting company helping businesses manage their customer relationships. But it quickly started building its own software on Salesforce’s cloud platform to coordinate people who worked in field service management. This covered the large swath of individuals who traveled off-site, often to carry out repair work: everything from technicians installing cables in people’s homes to engineers fixing the heating and cooling systems of some of the world’s tallest buildings.

By way of example, when maintenance workers arrive at the Empire State Building to repair an air-conditioning unit, they’ll probably be carrying an iPad loaded with ServiceMax’s app, where they can record what they’ve done, chat with members of their team or request components for replacement. They can also see other repairs being carried out in the building’s complex schematic of floors, ventilation systems and thermostats.

GE has been integrating ServiceMax’s core software into Predix, its app-development platform for the Industrial Internet. One of the reasons ServiceMax can now offer AI-driven suggestions is the “two-way street” for data that Predix makes possible, Berg says. Operators at a power plant connected to the Industrial Internet, for instance, can already use Predix’s Asset Performance Management module to predict when their turbines and generators might next need a repair. But with the ServiceMax app, they’ll also record that repair by the specific technician as it happens. This teaches the software about how long the maintenance procedure takes, as well as any extra tweaks the worker had to make or spare parts he or she needed.

Such software-enabled decision-making is part of a wider shift in how industrial companies are maintaining their assets. Tracking real-life repairs trains these apps over time on how long such maintenance will take and how successful it’ll be. “The more assets GE customers are running through [the APM app on Predix], the more data we have on the operation of machinery,” Berg says. “If you add on the capturing of data from service technicians, you not only know how machines operate, but how people fix them and the impact on machines. It’s a unique, closed-loop service.”

3D printing is taking off. Literally.

Just a few weeks ago, GE Aviation fired up for the first time the Advanced Turboprop engine. The company 3D printed 35 percent of the engine, combining 855 parts into just 12. 3D printing helped GE designers shave off more than 100 pounds in weight, improve fuel burn by as much as 20 percent, give the engine 10 percent more power and simplify maintenance compared with older GE turboprops. “This engine is a game-changer,” said Paul Corkery, general manager of the Advanced Turboprop program.

The ATP is the latest GE machine that takes advantage of additive manufacturing, a family of new industrial technologies that includes 3D printing. GE has invested $3 billion in the space, including $200 million in research and development, and launched a new business unit called GE Additive. The company acquired majority stakes in 3D-printer makers Concept Laser and Arcam, which also make the special powders used for metal printing.

That investment is bearing fruit. 3D-printed fuel nozzles already are at work inside engines that power Airbus and Boeing passenger jets. GE has shipped 25,000 3D-printed parts to date.

GE also has begun opening a constellation of global “Customer Experience Centers” where companies can learn about 3D design and take the machines for a spin. The first opened in Pittsburgh in 2016, and a second opened in Munich in early December. More are being planned worldwide, with a goal of having at least one center in each region.

Jennifer Cipolla, GE Additive’s global leader in charge of the centers, says that “within two very short years, the conversation around 3D printing has shifted from ‘Why should I get into additive manufacturing and why is it important?’ to ‘Oh my gosh, my competitors are doing additive and I’m behind! How do I catch up?’”

We were curious, too, so we caught up with Cipolla and her colleague Matthew Beaumont, who runs the Munich center, at the opening last month. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Top image: GE’s Jennifer Cipolla runs GE Additive’s customer experience centers. Above: At the center in Munich, companies can learn about 3D design and take the machines for a spin. Images credit: GE Additive.

GE Reports: How has your job changed over the last two years?

Jennifer Cipolla: It changed a lot. Instead of trying to convince people that additive manufacturing is the way of the future, they’re already there. It’s now about taking the deep domain expertise that GE has built up over many years and helping our customers to realize the full value of 3D printing, from design and selecting the right parts fit for printing, to prototyping, optimizing the production process and getting the parts certified.

Matthew Beaumont: That’s why we opened the site here in Munich. In Pittsburgh, we are also helping GE businesses embrace additive, but the Munich location is the first GE Additive experience center built specifically for customers outside of GE.  We want to take this value that we have accumulated over the past decade since GE started exploring the additive space and share it with our customers. If you are just starting out, you can come in for a quick tour to learn what additive manufacturing is. But you can also attend really intense, multiday workshops.

Matthew Beaumont (front left) and Cipolla (in the front second from right) at the opening of the Munich center in December. Image credit: GE Additive.

GER: Walk us through the center’s offerings.

MB: They are built around three pillars. One is obviously the 3D-printing machines that we now make. You can come in and touch them and see them when they are running. Design is another one. Customers who attend our workshops can bring a part they made by molding or some other traditional way. We help them scan it, create a 3D model and adjust the design in a way that’s most optimal for 3D printing. Finally, we can help them figure out the business case for additive manufacturing. Does it make sense for them to buy machines or contract with someone? What would their shop floor look like? How do they move from prototyping to full production? What would it mean for their supply chain?

JC: In my experience, getting their head around the business case is one of the hardest things for companies to do. Some customers have no idea where to begin, but GE has done it at GE Power and GE Aviation.

GER: How does GE benefit?

MB: We get input from the customers and hear from them about their experience with the machines and what they’d really like to have in the next generation. If we hear the same “What if?” and “Would this be possible?” from several customers in a row, we will feed that information right back to the engineering and design teams.

GER: When Florian Mauerer, head of the additive business unit at Swiss technology company Oerlikon, spoke at the opening, he called additive the physical leg of the information revolution. Do you agree?

JC: Absolutely. Additive manufacturing is inherently a digital manufacturing technology. It allows us to get data about the product and also from the machines. We can understand what’s happening during design and before, during and after production. We can feed the data into apps built on Predix, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet, and analyze machine utilization, how much powder we have left on the machines, and many other factors. Here in Munich we have displays above our shop floor showing information coming off machines at our additive centers in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. We know the state of those machines, what they are printing and what materials they are using. If you look at sites as a globally distributed manufacturing supply chain, digital is going to be a key element to that.

“We call it intelligent dispatching.”
– Scott Berg,
chief executive of GE’s ServiceMax

1. THE FIXER

Don’t be too surprised if calling for maintenance gets a lot more efficient soon. Starting this year, artificial intelligence couldmake service dispatch decisions for power companies much easier to make. Software engineers at ServiceMax, a software company acquired by GE in 2016, are developing AI algorithms designed to help customers better manage repair crews.

The system will use data from real-life repairs to pick the right repair person by scanning each individual’s work history and predicting which technician would be the quickest and most reliable at a particular task like, say, installing a cable in someone’s home or fixing a wind turbine. “We call it intelligent dispatching,” Scott Berg, chief executive of GE’s ServiceMax, said. “We’re running a proof of concept now.”

Learn more about how AI-driven suggestions will improve the way we fix things.

2. BESPOKE BIKES

Have you ever ridden a bike that was custom-tailored to your body? Have you ever ridden one that was 3D-printed? EnterKinazo’s E1, the first 3D-printed electric bicycle, made in partnership with Volkswagen. Using a powerful printer for metals, the E1 e-bike is customizable to each customer’s personal needs, from arm and leg length to weight and balance. The bicycle weighs 44 pounds and retails for $23,500.

What kind of 3D printer can print an entire bike frame? Kinazo’s Patrick Paul and his team used the largest commercial 3D printer for metals on the market — theConcept Laser X Line 2000R 3D printer. The machine has a build area of roughly 2.5 feet by 1.5 feet by 1.5 feet, enough space to print the largest piece of the frame as one single part.

Start saving up for your own custom 3D-printed e-bike now — and learn more about the revolutionary vehiclehere.

3. 2018 PREDICTIONS

Fromcancer-fighting cells to“edge” technologies, 2017 was a year of breakthroughs in science and technology. Wonder what tech innovations are in store for 2018? Experts from GE Ventures weighed in with theirprojections.

According to their predictions, we are moving toward new models and markets for renewable energy, more personalized and accurate health care and decentralized manufacturing facilities— all thanks to technological advancements gaining steam.

Learn more about GE’s vision for 2018here.

COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH🌎

1. Brain cancer bullseye

Scientists at the University of Leeds in the U.K. have figured out how to breach the blood brain barrier — already a feat — to fight brain tumors by infecting them with a virus and making them visible for the body’s immune system. The approach could lead to new therapies for treating more aggressive brain cancers.

2. Robo-toddler

A robot programmed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley can perform “intelligent planning of highly flexible skills in complex real-world situations” thanks to assessing its surroundings like a toddler. The technology could help self-driving cars anticipate future events on the road and produce more intelligent robotic assistants for homes.

3. Space crops on Earth

“The world has to produce 60% to 80% more food by 2050 to feed its 9 billion people,” and researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia are helping us get there with a new “speed breeding” process for crops. The process can double to triple the speed of plant growth and allow scientists to generate hardier crops faster.

Read more about these, plus crawling plastic and bacterial submarines, here.

Quote: GE Reports. Images: Tomas Kellner/GE Reports, Boston Celtics, GE Global Research, Stephanie Aglietti/AFP/Getty Images.

Subscribe to The GE Brief here.

As Hollywood’s awards season continues and film studios jockey for their Oscars, one Los Angeles entity has racked up enough trophies to make Warner Brothers green with envy. Southern California Edison (SCE), a utility that provides 15 million residents with electricity, has won six awards — including two for innovation, one for clean air from environmental regulators, and even one from Power Engineering for Best Overall Project — all for launching the world’s first hybrid power plant in Los Angeles last spring.

Engineers call the technology the Hybrid Electric Gas Turbine, or Hybrid EGT, if you really want to get technical. It has helped SCE solve an issue that has vexed the renewable energy industry since its inception — it must yield to Mother Nature’s whims. A covering of clouds or windless afternoon can result in little or no power generation for several hours — something even renewable energy’s most avid fans cannot abide.

That’s why about a decade ago, utilities began installing small natural gas turbines next to wind and solar farms to spring into action when the weather ceases to cooperate. These “peaker” plants helped bring solar and wind power mainstream, but the turbines still took 10 minutes to ramp up — too long for anyone watching a football game or racing to finish a paper on a deadline to be without electricity. To avoid unexpected blackouts, even short ones, utilities left their peakers on at times, burning fossil fuels even when demand was low because reliability concerns were high. SCE, its fellow utilities, and the environment were stuck with a partial solution.

That started to change around 2015 when SCE began throwing batteries into the mix. Working with GE Power’s Grid Solutions and Power Services businesses, SCE paired a 10 MW GE battery system assembled from lithium-ion cells that can supply the electrical grid with power for up to 30 minutes with GE’s LM6000 peaker gas turbine, which can reach 50 MW in about 5 minutes. (The turbine is really a modified jet engine.) Now, if the wind dies down or clouds form, the battery takes over instantly, giving the peaker ample time to get up to speed. When the wind kicks in again, the battery goes off duty and starts recharging so it’s juiced up for the next windless or overcast day.

It’s a system akin to a hybrid car, where the battery charges off the gas engine and then the two alternate so smoothly that the driver never knows which power source is propelling her down the street.

Above: The system is akin to a hybrid car, where the battery (in the back) charges off the gas engine (in blue in the middle) and then the two alternate so smoothly that the driver never knows which power source is propelling her down the street. Image credit: GE Power. Top: SCE provides 15 million California residents with electricity. Image credit: Getty Images.

GE engineers also added sophisticated power-management software to optimize how Hybrid EGT shifts from wind to battery to natural gas. The software keeps constant tabs on supply and demand on the power grid. “In an idle period, we will be watching voltage or frequency and responding to deviation as if the turbine were online,” explains Joe Heinzmann, senior product manager of battery hybrid electric gas turbines at GE’s Power Services division. “Then if there’s a need for energy, we immediately respond by discharging the battery and starting up the gas turbine to provide the required energy.” Once the urgent need passes, operators quickly stop the gas turbine, while the battery system remains online and active. As a result, peaker plants connected to the hybrid system are activated half as often they once did, reducing emissions and wear

This elegant system will benefit California’s environmental health. SCE estimates it will use 2 million fewer gallons of water to operate each power site and reduce greenhouse emissions for the lifecycle of its peakers by 60 percent. It’s also paying off handsomely for SCE itself. Not only does using less water and natural gas drive down operational costs, but the type of power Hybrid EGT produces is very much in demand. Spinning reserve — the term used for power that can become available in less than 10 minutes — is currently valued between $5 and $7 per megawatt an hour (MWH), whereas its slower counterpart, known as non-spin reserve, only sells for 10 cents per MWH. Thanks to its new batteries, SCE can easily and cheaply generate spinning reserve for the grid.

The LM6000 gas turbine uses technology from GE’s CF6 jet engine. Image credit: Rob Butler for GE Aviation.

As Vibhu Kaushik, director of grid technology and modernization at SCE, explains it, “Renewable and energy storage provide the perfect combination where you can harness renewable energy and match the supply to how the demand is shaped on the grid.” All of that should help shepherd California closer to its goal of renewables supplying half its electricity by 2030. At a total usage of 28 percent now, the state is already comfortably en route to hitting 30 percent by 2020.

No wonder industry experts continue to shower SCE with honors and accolades. However, unlike many other award-winning stars in Los Angeles, the secret to Hybrid EGT is invisibility. After all, electrical power is at its height when no one even notices it’s there.

Human hearts, as most schoolchildren know, are located in the upper left side of the chest. But under the skin, things get murkier. In fact, medical workers occasionally confuse the heart with another organ when conducting an ultrasound scan, even when they are in the right location. “Sometimes when people go in for a liver scan, if the sonologist is not trained enough, they mistakenly scan the heart,” says Ratnadeep Paul, lead engineer for augmented and virtual reality at GE Global Research.

While advances in less-expensive pocket-sized ultrasound machines, such as GE Healthcare’s Vscan, make the scanning technology more readily available to far-flung hospitals, there is a deficit in operating skills. A mistake often means the patient has to return for a second scan. “One of the major issues we are facing in developing countries is that there are not enough trained ultrasound sonologists,” Paul says.

That’s why Paul and his team are developing an augmented reality (AR) system to train sonologists and eventually to provide live guidance for ultrasound technicians. They have programmed Microsoft HoloLens glasses to work in conjunction with a scanner. When a trainee wears the glasses, she can see on a dummy where a typical human’s organs are located and what they look like as the sonogram wand moves over the body. The headgear provides directions to specific organs and tells the trainee to move in certain ways in order to properly and completely capture the scan.

“We position virtual organs in the field of view of the operator, overlaid on top of the dummy,” Paul says. “This allows the technician to position the probe on top of the correct organ. The placement of the virtual organs will be done by live tracking of the patient’s body and using our own proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms.”

Top and above: “We position virtual organs in the field of view of the operator, overlaid on top of the dummy,” Paul says. GIF credits: GE Reports.

In addition to the HoloLens, Paul says they are exploring tablet and phone options for viewing the virtual organs. The GE Global Research team also is looking to develop an AR program that works on “pregnant” dummies as well so that technicians training in, say, rural Africa can better learn how to spot problems in pregnancy ultrasounds.

The AR system, which is not yet on the market, eventually could be used on live patients for training and to guide novice technicians in an emergency. But Palu says that for now they are using dummies exclusively in the research lab for two main reasons: “We can position the dummy in different orientations, and it can sit still for long durations as we test the different equipment.”

The project is still in the research and development phase, but the final goal is to send ultrasound machines and AR headsets to hospitals, medical and nursing schools, and other facilities in both developing and developed countries. “We are currently testing out the feasibility of integrating AR, AI and patient and probe tracking in a single unified system and understanding how or if it can improve the efficiency of the ultrasound technician (especially for less skilled technicians) and reduce the errors in ultrasound imaging,” Ratnadeep says.

Every minute, approximately 255 babies are born around the world. Most of them arrive full-term at 37 to 40 weeks’ gestation. However, 10 percent are born prematurely and need additional care to survive.

In 2012, Brittany and Scott Bolick were expecting their first child. Years prior, Brittany had uterine cancer, so they were aware that the pregnancy was going to be high-risk. But they still expected her to carry the baby past the 32-week mark.

Brittany had a rough pregnancy with a variety of complications. At 20 weeks, she was hospitalized at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford on bed rest — and at 22 weeks her water broke. “It became a battle to both manage Brittany’s pain and to keep the baby inside for as long as possible,” said Scott, an executive who runs GE Digital’s ServiceMax unit. “As a software product manager, I sat at her bedside and tried to find a better way to track the odds of survival for our son. I estimated that for every day, there was a 2 percent increase in the chance of survival — and I greeted each day as a gift.”

At 24 weeks and five days, Brittany was once again in incredible pain, and as midnight struck, her medical team decided to perform a C-section immediately. Their son, Will, came into the world weighing just 1 pound, 11 ounces on January 11, 2013. The average weight of a newborn baby boy is just short of 8 pounds in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Bolicks vividly remember listening to the doctors debating their son’s fragile hold on life and hearing the words “let’s resuscitate,” followed by a commanding, “It’s a go. Let’s get him to the NICU,” an acronym for neonatal intensive care unit.

Once Will was stable, Scott took a picture of him and rushed back to his wife. She smiled — relieved to see her son for the first time — even if only in a photo. She then immediately asked him how big he was. Scott pointed to the image of their son, which he printed out on a standard letter-size piece of paper, and said, “Honey, this is about his size.”

Will spent five months in the NICU at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, ensconced in the protective cocoon of a Giraffe Omnibed, a machine that does double duty as an incubator and radiant warmer. Incidentally, the system, which creates a seamless healing microenvironment for babies, was designed by Scott’s colleagues at GE Healthcare. “It was an incredibly stressful time with a lot of ups and downs,” the parents recalled. A couple months in, for example, they got a call from Will’s doctor telling them to come to the hospital immediately. “Will had developed a respiratory infection, and we were told he wasn’t going to make it through the day,” Scott said.

Above: Will spent five months in the NICU at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Top: Meet the Bolicks. Images credit: The Bolick family.

Will made it through the day thanks to an incredible group of nurses, respiratory therapists, and doctors, Scott said. “I’m a strong believer that a big part of Will’s survival was thanks to the goodness that resides in everyone,” he said. “I can perfectly picture incredible acts of skill, courage and kindness. One respiratory therapist was told multiple times to go home but refused to leave our son’s side for over 24 hours. I also remember doctors arguing over his treatment — and one special doctor who made the call to give Will the nitrous oxide that helped to save his life.”

The Bolicks said that “the medical team was absolutely incredible, especially the nurses. But we also noticed looking around the NICU as senior statesmen that we, as the parents, played a huge role in our son’s care. Ultimately, the parents have to be the quarterback for their children’s care. That is the only way it works.” Recognizing the importance of this, Scott and Brittany created the Will’s Way Foundation to promote family integrated care.

Today, Will is 5 years old and is still fighting. He learned to walk at age 4; he’s working on eating and speaking. Despite all the setbacks and complications, he is a happy kid who’s on track to start mainstream kindergarten next fall.

“I’m a strong believer that a big part of Will’s survival was thanks to the goodness that resides in everyone,” says Scott Bolick. Image credit: The Bolick family.

A version of this story originally appeared on GE Healthcare’s Pulse blog.

Scientists at Duke University flexed human muscles grown from stem cells for the first time, a thumbnail-sized sensor connected to a smartphone app can track your sun exposure, and another device can sniff out counterfeit homebrew in your expensive drink. Here’s a toast to science.

Bioengineering Is Flexing Muscles

What is it? Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina have bioengineered in a lab “the first functioning human skeletal muscle from induced pluripotent stem cells.”

Why does it matter? The team said the breakthrough could allow researchers to model rare degenerative diseases and develop new regenerative treatments. “The prospect of studying rare diseases is especially exciting for us,” said Nenad Bursac, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. “When a child’s muscles are already withering away from something like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, it would not be ethical to take muscle samples from them and do further damage. But with this technique, we can just take a small sample of non-muscle tissue, like skin or blood, revert the obtained cells to a pluripotent state, and eventually grow an endless amount of functioning muscle fibers to test.”

How does it work? The team first collected human skin and blood cells and reprogrammed them so the reverted to their “primordial state.” From this pluripotent state, the cells can theoretically develop into any tissue. Next, they induced them with a molecule that prompted the cells to start becoming muscle. “It’s taken years of trial and error, making educated guesses and taking baby steps to finally produce functioning human muscle from pluripotent stem cells,” Lingjun Rao, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac’s lab at Duke.

Top image: A cross section of a muscle fiber grown from induced pluripotent stem cells. The green indicates muscle cells, the blue is cell nuclei, and the red is the surrounding support matrix for the cells. Caption and image credits: Duke University.

The Bright Side of Science

What is it? Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois say they developed the world’s smallest wearable sensor. The sensor, which is “as light as a raindrop and smaller in circumference than an M&M,” fits on a fingernail and measures a person’s exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. The team developed it together with the beauty company L’Oreal. They unveiled it this week at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Why does it matter? The team believes the device “provides the most convenient, most accurate way for people to measure sun exposure in a quantitative manner,” according to John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering and neurological surgery in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. It could help users monitor and manage their sun exposure and potentially save lives by reducing skin cancer.

How does it work? The device, called UV Sense, is “one of the few sensors that directly measures the most harmful UV rays,” said Rogers. “Further, it simultaneously records body temperature, which is also very important in the context of sun exposure.” The sensor streams the data to a smartphone app, which provides information about the user’s sun exposure “either for that day or over time,” according to the university.

Building Better Solar Panels

“If we want to accelerate the pace of new materials development, it is imperative that we figure out faster and more accurate ways to troubleshoot our early-stage materials and prototype devices,” says MIT’s Tonio Buonassisi. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Researchers at MIT developed a fast way to test new materials for solar panels and predict their performance. The research, which was published in the journal Joule, is using physical testing in combination with computer and statistical modeling to “predict the overall performance of the material in real-world operating conditions,” according to MIT News.

Why does it matter?“Historically, the rate of new materials development is slow — typically 10 to 25 years,” Tonio Buonassisi, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and senior author of the paper, told MIT News. “If we want to accelerate the pace of new materials development, it is imperative that we figure out faster and more accurate ways to troubleshoot our early-stage materials and prototype devices.”

How does it work? Buonassisi and his colleagues start by measuring the current output from a test device with the new material “under different levels of illumination and different voltages.” Next, they use computer algorithms to zero in on a precise result. His colleague and co-author Rachel Kurchin said the approach was useful given that “lab equipment has gotten more expensive, and computers have gotten cheaper.” The technique “allows you to minimize your use of complicated lab equipment,” she said.

The Ozone Hole’s Healing

What is it? Here’s some good climate news for a change. NASA’s Aura satellite directly observed for the first time that the ozone hole is healing. The data shows that an international ban on ozone-destroying chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in air-conditioners, aerosol sprays and other products reduced ozone depletion by 20 percent, compared with measurements from 2005.

Why does it matter? The stratospheric ozone layer helps protect Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancer, damage plants and lead to other harm.

How does it work? When chlorine from CFCs reacts with ozone molecules, it rips them apart and destroys the protective layer. “We see very clearly that chlorine from CFCs is going down in the ozone hole, and that less ozone depletion is occurring because of it,” said Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She said that the results give her team “confidence that the decrease in ozone depletion through mid-September” was “due to declining levels of chlorine coming from CFCs.” She added: “We’re not yet seeing a clear decrease in the size of the ozone hole because that’s controlled mainly by temperature after mid-September, which varies a lot from year to year.”

We’ll Drink To That!

A new sensor can sniff out “the alcoholic content and brand of 14 different liquors, including various scotch whiskies, bourbon, rye, brandy and vodka with greater than 99 percent accuracy,” according to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed a portable sensor that can sniff out fake liquors. The team reported in the journal ACS Sensors that they used the device to correctly identify “the alcoholic content and brand of 14 different liquors, including various scotch whiskies, bourbon, rye, brandy and vodka with greater than 99 percent accuracy,” and even “sniffed out booze that had been watered down, even by as little as 1 percent.”

Why does it matter? The team reported that booze adulterated with home-brewed liquors and even antifreeze sickened and killed people in Indonesia, Russia, Poland and elsewhere around the world.

How does it work? The sensor contains 36 dyes that “change color upon exposure to particular components in liquor.” The team reported that “partial oxidation of the liquor vapors improved the sensor’s response.”

In 2014, three young men from far-flung parts of the world teamed up in Finland with an audacious plan that could soon help doctors save more lives, not to mention money, and chart a new course for healthcare.

Oguzhan Gencoglu, who hails from Turkey, is an AI and machine-learning whiz currently working on his Ph.D. in computer science, Hung Ta is a Vietnamese math prodigy with a doctorate in biotechnology, and Timo Heikkinen is a Finnish entrepreneur with a software industry background. Together, they launched Top Data Science, an AI startup based in Helsinki that’s developing software that can make sense of millions of data points, alert doctors to unseen medical patterns, help them diagnose disease and track patients during treatment.

Their “intelligent” code is already analyzing thousands of MRI images and could one day help radiologists at the Helsinki University Central Hospital diagnose prostate cancer. Another set of algorithms is crunching data from the hospital’s intensive care unit and using it to identify high-risk cases that may soon need urgent medical care, as well as flag patients who are progressing well and who could be released to standard hospital care. “For humans, it’s simply impossible to make sense of the hundreds of parameters, the constant flow of number and background information,” Gencoglu says. “For the algorithm, it’s a piece of cake.”

Above: Members of GE’s Health Innovation Village in Helsinki, like Top Data Science, are taking advantage of Helsinki’s active startup scene and events like Slush, a huge technology confab that last fall drew 20,000 visitors, 2,600 startups and some 1,500 investors and speakers, including Silicon Valley legend Vinod Khosla and conference-opener Al Gore. Image credit: Tomas Kellner/GE Reports. Top: Ta, Heikinnen, and Gencoglu (from left to right) founded Top Data Science. Image credit: Top Data Science.

Heikkinen sought out Ta in 2013, after he applied for a job at the software company where Heikkinen had worked as a marketing director. Ta, then a big-data consultant, listed on his resume achievements such as the prestigious Marie Curie research fellowship, a Ph.D. in data mining and bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary science involving software and biotech, and a silver medal in Vietnam’s national math Olympics. “His credentials were spectacular,” Heikkinen says.

He persuaded Ta to drop his job application and start working with him on their own code. What they had in drive and ambition, they lacked in direction. “We knew that there was demand for AI and machine learning,” Heikkinen says. “We wanted to tackle real problems with customers and then figure out how the company will develop.”

One area that seemed rich for mining was healthcare. A U.S. hospital, for example, generates some 50 petabytes of data per year on average, enough to fill 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets with standard pages of text. But 97 percent of the information never gets used.

Their timing was good. In 2014, GE Healthcare launched in Helsinki the Health Innovation Village, a startup incubator located in Helsinki’s “Silicon Vallila” district. The village is complete with an artisanal coffee shop and tattooed baristas keeping the synapses firing for founders and employees of some 30 promising young companies from across Europe. They are developing such ideas as a smart needle to help doctors analyze meningitis, a line of clothing for premature babies, and tools to mitigate the side effects of cancer therapy.

The denizens of the village are taking advantage of Helsinki’s active startup scene and events like Slush, a huge technology confab that last fall drew 20,000 visitors, 2,600 startups and some 1,500 investors and speakers, including Silicon Valley legend Vinod Khosla and conference-opener Al Gore. “We have partnered with Slush since the beginning of the Health Innovation Village in 2014,” says “village chief” Mikko Kauppinen. “It’s a great place for us to find new startups for the village and showcase the current companies to investors and corporate partners from all over the world.”

Heikkinen and Ta secured a desk at the GE village in 2014 and got to work. By then, they’d recruited Gencoglu to help them develop Top Data Science’s first machine-learning algorithms. Through the Village, they also got access to GE’s business network, and they started showing their software to local medical institutions.

A growing number of previous AI successes helped them make their case. Scientists at Stanford University, for example, trained their algorithm called CheXNet on more than 100,000 public chest X-ray images released by the National Institutes of Health. In just over a month, the algorithm outperformed four Stanford radiologists in diagnosing pneumonia accurately, according to the university, and the code reportedly can diagnose up to 14 medical conditions.

The founders at the Health Innovation Village with their first employee, data scientist Quan Nguyen Minh (on the right). Image credit: Top Data Science.

Doctors at the Helsinki University Central Hospital were interested in something similar. They wanted to use Top Data Science’s software to help them diagnose prostate cancer using magnetic resonance images and minimize biopsies.

Ta and Gencoglu started by feeding their algorithm with thousands of MRI images of the prostate and then used corresponding biopsy information and scores from pathologists to analyze the pictures and detect and classify lesions and other biomarkers in them. They used 80 percent of their images to train the software and kept the remaining 20 percent “hidden” from the machine-learning algorithm so they could confirm the results. “We did this randomly many times so we could statistically validate that the algorithm was actually learning,” Gencoglu says. “We are trying to predict how aggressive and where precisely the cancer is in the prostate from the MRI image, so we doctors don’t need to do invasive biopsies.” The solution is still in development, he says.

Next, the hospital decided to test the company’s software further by optimizing its intensive care unit. The doctors asked Top Data Science to perform two predictive tasks: Use data to identify patients who were at high risk of getting sicker, and spot patients who would remain stable for 12 to 24 hours and could be released from the ICU.

Here the Top Data Science team supplied its software with a diet of tens of millions data points from the records of nearly 3,000 patients who had approved the use of their data. The software looked at second-by-second readings such as heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure, as well as laboratory tests and other vital signs and drug and demographic data. “In the first instance, we wanted to alert the doctors to possible adverse events in the near future,” Heikkinen says. “The second goal was very different. We had to be very sure that it was OK to discharge the patient from the ICU.”

After several months, the algorithm found that 13 percent of patients could have been released from the ICU sooner. Their results had 95 percent accuracy. “We aim to just provide guidance,” Gencoglu cautions. “Ultimately it’s the doctor who makes the decision.”

Erno Muuranto, managing director and engineering director at GE Healthcare Finland, says that the country is a good place to work on data applications for healthcare because local hospitals embraced digitization early and now have big databases of patient information going back 10 to 15 years. “Machine learning depends on access to high quality data, and the learning algorithms typically need large amounts of it,” he says. “Many of GE’s analytics solutions are being developed in Finland, because here, in this small Northern country, hierarchy is low and collaboration with companies, universities and healthcare is straight-forward.”

Heikkinen says that in the future, Top Data Science’s algorithms could be used to spot other cancers and disease. The company currently is working with GE Digital to move its software to Predix, GE’s app development platform for the Industrial Internet. The team already has traveled to GE’s software headquarters in San Ramon, California, and to its European Digital Foundry in Paris.

Heikkinen says that as patient monitoring becomes remote, with wearable devices keeping track of patients around the clock — something that Muuranto’s team is working on — the predictive power of his company’s software will come into full view. “We will be able to help doctors find patterns they would never get to see,” he says.

When a drug trial fails, many factors could be involved, including the way the study was designed, the treatment’s efficacy or safety risks. Some of these are easier to fix than others. Innovative diagnostics based on cognitive tests, lab tests and imaging agents, for example, have enabled more efficient selection of patients into clinical trials. This could help with showing whether a drug is safe and effective.

One area where trial failure is particularly notable is Alzheimer’s disease research, where between 2002 and 2012, an astonishing 99.6 percent of trials failed. Patient-selection criteria have been a significant factor, as have safety aspects. These recent high-profile failures prompted the use of molecular imaging techniques to screen for suitable patients at study entry.

However, researchers can now use brain imaging with positron emission tomography (PET) as an adjunct to other clinical evaluations for selecting patients who have amyloid deposits in their brains. These specific protein deposits have been associated with Alzheimer’s.

This technique has improved the process of matching suitable patients for a clinical trial, and has been adopted by pharmaceutical companies. However, significant challenges still exist, and for the past 18 months a team of researchers at GE has been attempting to address these with a digital solution.

The GE team, made up of imaging scientists and software engineers, is developing an algorithm that could further improve the patient-selection process by identifying those who suffer from a form of the disease that is progressing faster.

Above: A comparison of positive and negative PET scans for neuritic amyloid plaque in the brain. Image credit: GE Healthcare. Top: A new GE app could help researchers identify which patients have the hallmark amyloid plaques present in their brains and will go on to develop Alzheimer’s within three years, a time frame commensurate with Alzheimer’s disease treatment regimens in most clinical trials. Image credit: Getty Images.

Current scientific evidence shows that with Alzheimer’s, beta-amyloid accumulates in the brain over time before neurodegeneration develops and cognitive decline begins. The challenge facing pharmaceutical researchers is that each individual’s journey along the disease continuum is different. So when subjects diagnosed with preclinical or mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s are randomized in a clinical trial, the trial will be made up of a mixed group of patients, each at a slightly different disease stage and trajectory toward dementia. This makes it difficult to gather enough evidence of drug efficacy, particularly as some patients will have significant levels of amyloid present in the brain, but may not develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s for many years or even at all.

The new GE app could help researchers identify which patients have the hallmark amyloid plaques present in their brains and will go on to develop Alzheimer’s within three years, a time frame commensurate with Alzheimer’s disease treatment regimens in most clinical trials.

The app relies on predictive analytics based on machine learning algorithms. It determines a risk score for the likelihood of progression to Alzheimer’s disease for each trial candidate. The software works with a wide range of clinical, genetic and imaging data collected during the diagnostic and trial selection process for each patient. It uses machine learning techniques to combine the data in a new and insightful way. The result is a probability score that makes it possible to select a more homogeneous group of patients for testing new drugs that could modify the disease.

Currently, the app is able to predict which patients will progress rapidly with 86 percent accuracy. This is a 24 percent improvement over using PET imaging alone and suggests an improved ability to select patients for a particular trial. Early feedback has been promising. GE shared the app with pharma companies at the 10th Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease meeting held late last year in Boston.

The hope is that the app may help bring disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s to the market sooner. The app also possibly could be used in routine clinical practice to identify patients who may respond to new therapies.

One day, patients could even use apps to collect data about their own disease progression, delivering on the promise of personalized medicine.

The Italian priest and scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani ran a series of experiments in the 1790s and discovered that blindfolded bats were able to find their way around and catch flies. Yet, when he took off the blindfolds and covered the bats’ ears, they were hopeless. This puzzling finding inspired his colleague, the Swiss surgeon Louis Jurine, to focus on the ears as the seat of bats’ “vision.”

Spallanzani and Jurine shared their notes but were ultimately left scratching their heads. They couldn’t understand how the animals pulled off this trick. It wasn’t until 1938 that Donald Griffin and Robert Galambos discovered the physics behind echolocation — the idea of emitting sounds inaudible to humans and listening to their reflections to make sense of the environment. Today, that natural principle is the basis of many modern technologies. Sonar allows submarines to avoid collisions and find targets, radar guides planes in the air, lidar helps self-driving cars “see” the road, and ultrasound assists doctors in saving lives.

Above: Ana Paula Silveira and Alvaro Zermiani are both legally blind. But they were able to touch the face of their son, Davi, when he still in his mother’s womb. Ana Paula’s doctor used data from GE’s Voluson E10 machine to 3D print the fetus. Image credit: Ana Paula Silveira and Alvaro Zermiani. Top: An image captured by the Voluson E10 machine. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

Before ultrasound — it was first used for clinical purposes in 1956— doctors did not always have a safe and reliable way to see what was happening inside the womb during pregnancy. The placenta, for example, is a critically important health indicator for mother and child. But its location was difficult to pin down, leading doctors to prescribe weeks of bedrest to otherwise healthy mothers.

Today, clinicians use the technology to see the human body in incredible ways. Gone are the grainy images most expectant parents carried in their wallets as recently as five years ago. The latest machines like the Voluson E10 from GE Healthcare can produce images in 4D — three spatial dimensions plus time. They can also export data to a 3D printer to enhance conversations around surgical planning, or allow blind parents to “meet” their child.

Other ultrasound systems can visualize blood flow as it moves through the hearts of the tiniest patients, down to the blood cells. Other devices, like the Vscan Extend, which fits into a physician’s pocket, help doctors diagnose and treat patients in remote areas far from medical centers.

GE Healthcare is also integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence into ultrasound imaging in one of its most recent devices, called Venue. Take a look at the evolution of ultrasound in OB/GYN over the last six decades.

Software from GE Healthcare enabled Dr. Ferran Rosés i Noguer and his team to enhance ultrasound images and track blood cells as they traveled through the heart. GIF credits: Dr. Ferran Rosés i Noguer.

A fetal hand at 29 weeks. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

The fetus at 14 weeks. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

The fetus at 38 weeks. Images credit: GE Healthcare.

A version of this story originally appeared in GE Healthcare’s Pulse blog.

Scientists in Pennsylvania are planning to re-engineer human immune cells to sniff out and kill cancer, a drone saved swimmers caught in rough surf in Australia, and an AI robot assistant in England found a new way to fight malaria — in toothpaste. Time to brush up on these and other remarkable developments we discovered this week.

Editing Out Cancer

Researchers already have used viruses to train the immune system to attack cancer, but this would be the first human trial in the U.S. that uses CRISPR to achieve a similar feat. Image credit: Getty Images.

What is it? Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are planning to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to alter the human body’s immune cells so they can recognize and kill cancer. They are planning a clinical study that may involve as many as 18 patients suffering from different cancers, including multiple myeloma, melanoma and synovial sarcoma.

Why does it matter? Researchers already have used viruses to train the immune system to attack cancer, but this would be the first human trial in the U.S. that uses CRISPR to achieve a similar feat.

How does it work?CRISPR allows scientists to rewrite faulty or unwanted human, animal and plant DNA. The team plans to remove the patients’ immune systems T-cells, edit them so they could fight cancer more effectively, and infuse them back into the body.

Drones To The Rescue

The drones, made by Australia’s Westpac Little Ripper company, are part of the local government’s multimillion-dollar “shark mitigation strategy.” Image credit: Westpac Little Ripper.

What is it? An autonomous “lifeguard” drone called Lifesaver rescued two teenage boys in Australia when beachgoers spotted them struggling in rough surf some 2,300 feet from the shore, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The beach patrol navigated the drone to the pair and dropped an “inflatable rescue pod” they could hold on to.

Why does it matter? Human lifeguards were still learning to use the drone when they deployed it on its maiden rescue mission. The drones, made by Australia’s Westpac Little Ripper company, are part of the local government’s multimillion-dollar “shark mitigation strategy.”

How does it work? The drone is equipped with a camera, digital controls and other technology. Lifeguard supervisor Jai Sheridan told the Herald that the drone enabled him to deliver aid within minutes of receiving the initial alert. “I was able to launch it, fly it to the location, and drop the pod all in about one to two minutes,” he said. “On a normal day that would have taken our lifeguards a few minutes longer to reach the members of the public.” You can see the rescue video here.

Air Pollution Solution

A view of Shanghai on a bad air day. Image credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? The Chinese city Xian, perhaps best known for being home to the world’s largest army of terracotta soldiers, is now building what might be the world’s biggest air purifier. Engineers already have started testing the concrete and steel structure, which is 323 feet tall.

Why does it matter? Many Chinese cities have been suffering from crippling air pollution, especially in the winter. Cao Junji, who runs the research, said that “improvements in air quality had been observed over an area of 10 square kilometers (3.86 square miles) in the city over the past few months and the tower has managed to produce more than 10 million cubic meters (353 million cubic feet) of clean air a day since its launch,” according to South China Morning Post. “Cao added that on severely polluted days the tower was able to reduce smog close to moderate levels,” the paper wrote.

How does it work? Cao and his team built the tower on the outskirts of town. The structure relies on “greenhouses covering about half the size of a soccer field around the base of the tower,” according to the newspaper. “Polluted air is sucked into the glasshouses and heated up by solar energy. The hot air then rises through the tower and passes through multiple layers of cleaning filters.” Cao told the paper that the tower “barely requires any power input throughout daylight hours. The idea has worked very well in the test run.”

All About Eve

Top image and above: “The discovery by our robot ‘colleague’ Eve that triclosan is effective against malaria targets offers hope that we may be able to use it to develop a new drug,” said Elizabeth Bilsland, the lead author of the paper, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Campinas, Brazil. Image credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? A “robot scientist” with AI smarts called Eve helped researchers at Cambridge University figure out that triclosan, an ingredient normally used in toothpaste to fight plaque, could be used to fight drug-resistant malaria. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Why does it matter? Although doctors are coming up with new ways to treat malaria, the disease still kills more than 500,000 people each year, according to the researchers. Scientists are growing worried that strains of the malaria parasite may grow immune to these drugs. “The discovery by our robot ‘colleague’ Eve that triclosan is effective against malaria targets offers hope that we may be able to use it to develop a new drug,” said Elizabeth Bilsland, the lead author of the paper, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Campinas, Brazil. “We know it is a safe compound, and its ability to target two points in the malaria parasite’s lifecycle means the parasite will find it difficult to evolve resistance.”

How does it work? Eve helped the team figure out that triclosan “affects parasite growth by specifically inhibiting an entirely different enzyme of the malaria parasite, called DHFR,” the University of Cambridge said in a news release. “DHFR is the target of a well-established antimalarial drug, pyrimethamine; however, resistance to the drug among malaria parasites is common, particularly in Africa. The Cambridge team showed that triclosan was able to target and act on this enzyme even in pyrimethamine-resistant parasites.”

X-Ray Vision

The team reported that the model achieved “higher than the best radiologist performance in detecting abnormalities on finger studies and equivalent on wrist studies.” Image credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? More AI news popped up on this side of the ocean. Researchers at Stanford University used radiological images from more than 12,000 patients to train a neural network to “detect and localize abnormalities.” The images of wrists, elbows, shoulders and other body parts came from studies labeled by human doctors as normal or abnormal. The team than matched the neural network against a team of certified Stanford radiologists to test its performance. How did it do? “We find that our model achieves performance comparable to that of radiologists,” the team reported in the online journal arXiv. The team wrote that that model achieved “higher than the best radiologist performance in detecting abnormalities on finger studies and equivalent on wrist studies. However, model performance is lower than best radiologist performance in detecting abnormalities on elbow, forearm, hand, humerus, and shoulder studies, indicating that the task is a good challenge for future research,” the team said.

Why does it matter? The team wrote that “there has been a growing effort to make repositories of medical radiographs openly available,” and that “access to large data sets “have led to deep learning algorithms achieving or approaching human-level performance on tasks such as image recognition.” Similar algorithms could be help doctors prioritize their work flow, moving the most urgent cases to the top of the pile. Software could also “help combat radiologist fatigue,” the team wrote.

How does it work? The team wrote that they built “a 169-layer convolutional neural network to predict the probability of abnormality for each image in a study.” The network’s architecture “connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion to make the optimization of deep networks tractable.” Late last year, another team at Stanford achieved a similar feat when they software to analyze chest X-rays and detect pneumonia.

Bobbi Eldrid and Lynda Kaufman have shared a job at GE Power for almost two decades. When they discovered they were both expecting their first children, they began chatting about an age-old struggle. “We were asking ourselves, ‘How do you balance being a mom with having a challenging role and a fulfilling career path?’” Eldrid says.

On a snowy day last December, a brand-new power plant in Connecticut was in the throes of preparing for “first fire,” the moment when a power station first runs fuel through its massive turbines. Slated for January, first fire is the cumulative test to prove that years of work invested by hundreds of designers, logistics and manufacturing workers and builders in the site and its technology would fuse together smoothly. When the plant, Competitive Power Ventures’ Towantic Energy Center, comes online later in the year, it will generate enough power to supply 800,000 homes.

Overseeing that critical moment were Bobbi Eldrid and Lynda Kaufman, two highly sought-after project managers at GE Power, which supplied the power plant’s turbines and generators. Like others with their job title, they each have a finger on the pulse of every last detail, whether that’s speeding up delivery of replacements parts or addressing customers’ questions or concerns along the way.

Yet, these two women take their collaborative skills a step further, expertly juggling what may be the longest-running work-share partnership in GE’s history. The colleagues handle every decision, customer interaction and contractual obligation as a single project-management entity — with Eldrid in her office in upstate New York and Kaufman 900 miles away in South Carolina. For 20 years, they’ve split their workweek evenly, so they both can go home and transform into hands-on moms, taking turns with carpooling, helping their kids with physics homework and delivering forgotten lunches to school.

Eldrid and Kaufman have shared a job at GE Power since 1998. They knew each other casually as engineers in Schenectady, New York, where GE makes turbines and generators. When they discovered they were both expecting their first children, they began chatting about an age-old struggle. “We were asking ourselves, ‘How do you balance being a mom with having a challenging role and a fulfilling career path?’” Eldrid says.

Above: Bobbi Eldrid in her office in Schenectady, New York. Top: Lynda Kaufman at a power plant construction site. They have shared a job at GE Power since 1988. Images credit: Bobbi Eldrid and Lynda Kaufman.

Together, they hit upon a solution that was right for them. Though GE Power did not offer an official work-share program, the company had begun encouraging such arrangements with a new policy that counted anyone who worked fewer than 30 hours per week as half an employee. That meant managers could hire a work-share team without sacrificing another position in their group.

After consulting with work-share teams in other GE businesses, the two women found a position overseeing the 7F gas turbine product line. These huge machines burn natural and spin generators inside power plants. The position that appealed to them both and they applied individually. Then they created a proposal for splitting the position.

What they came up with was deceptively simple: Both women put in 24 hours per week. The week begins on Sunday evening when the women hold a standing 2-hour phone call to go over their projects. Then Eldrid works Monday through Wednesday, and Kaufman works Wednesday through Friday. The overlapping of their schedules on Wednesdays allows them to collaborate and switch reins seamlessly.

Intrigued, their boss agreed to try the arrangement for half a year and then reassess the agreement. “Six months came and went, and we never had that discussion,” Kaufman recalls.

In fact, things were clearly working great. Nearly 20 years later, their arrangement has withstood five different job titles, the arrival of four children, and one long-distance move. Their well-tested partnership is a symbiosis that even an undertaking as complex as the Towantic project can’t unravel.

A GE 7F gas turbine on an assembly line at GE Power’s factory in Greenville, South Carolina. Although the machines weight many tons, their inner workings are as precise as clockwork. Image credit: GE Power.

Towantic began in March 2016, when power site developer Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) procured three turbines, two generators and additional equipment from GE.  Three months earlier — before anyone could even pronounce “Towantic” — Eldrid and Kaufman held a three-day kickoff meeting (one of the key types of events they both attend) to finalize project details with engineering and the customer. From there, they spent about one year working closely with engineering to meet CPV’s specifications.

Next, they coordinated with sourcing, manufacturing and logistics personnel so that every component would arrive promptly and unscathed, while chasing down answers to the customer’s technical questions. During the final phase, Eldrid and Kaufman have turned their attention to construction and the field engineering team, supporting the GE site team and doing whatever they can to keep things running smoothly on the construction site — holding meetings to resolve urgent technical, materials or parts issues, or managing the project costs, for example — as the date for first fire fast approached. They also have wrestled contractual issues as they’ve arisen and taken turns visiting the site.

The women have developed several behind-the-scenes maneuvers to seamlessly share their complex role. They adhere to a detailed filing system to keep track of vital emails or documents. They leave each other voicemails at the end of the day with updates on the day’s nuances, such as how a customer reacted to a specific idea or the dynamics at a meeting. And on Wednesdays, Eldrid says, “We put on our headsets and talk to each other all day.“ They have even cultivated a unified virtual identity, using one email account. Colleagues offhandedly refer to them as B/L — for Bobbi/Lynda — the office equivalent to Brangelina (with more staying power).

It’s a formula that can be replicated, but with one crucial caveat. Companies like GE cannot superimpose job sharing from above. “The onus is on the employee to put together their proposal, take it to the manager and keep communications going with one another,” Kaufman says. That’s largely because, like a good marriage, job sharing is predicated on compatibility and an inordinate amount of trust. “If Bobbi puts a PowerPoint presentation together on a Monday, I am still responsible for delivering it on a Thursday,” says Kaufman. While they may not agree on every sentence or chart, Eldrid knows that when she walks out the door on Wednesday, Kaufman will see the presentation through — and she will do it well.

The construction site of a power plant powered by GE’s 7F gas turbines. Image credit: GE Power.

Eldrid and Kaufman have applied their approach to many different jobs over the 20 years, but not without occasional challenges. After GE assigned them to manage CPV’s Woodbridge Energy Center project in 2013, for example, they found themselves explaining their partnership to CPV leadership. How would two part-time employees manage the scope of sprawling, complex projects? What contractual details would get lost in translation?

Once again, the duo’s process prevailed. Woodbridge Energy Center, another enormous super-efficient, natural gas-powered plant, successfully launched commercial operations in January 2016 to provide energy to 700,000 New Jersey homes. Their teamwork impressed CPV’s current head of engineering and construction, Dan Nugent, who worked with the women on both the Woodbridge and Towantic projects. “They were able to stay very well-coordinated,” he observed. “It didn’t matter who I spoke with, whether it was Bobbi or Lynda, they were up to speed on all the issues.”

Valuable as that coordination has been to CPV, it’s meant even more to Eldrid and Kaufman. It’s given them time to color with their children and run Girl Scout meetings. And when they ask themselves, “Do I have a meaningful career?” the answer is a resounding yes.

Jimmie Beacham, who runs GE Healthcare’s Advanced Manufacturing Lab in Waukesha, Wisconsin, received an unusual request a year ago. One of his colleagues asked him whether he could 3D print his heart. “He just had a CT scan, and he brought the data file to us,” Beacham says. “We said, ‘Why not?’ ”

Beacham was holding the 3D-printed heart in his hand when he talked to GE Reports last fall at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), the world’s largest gathering of radiologists and other medical professionals.

Companies like GE, BMW and others have been using 3D printing to make parts for jet engines, cars and other machines. But Beacham says that the new technology’s applications in healthcare are huge and equally transformative.

A prominent plastic surgeon in Paris already is using 3D-printed bone implants to reconstruct skulls ravaged by disease or crushed in accidents; Johnson & Johnson is studying ways to 3D print tailored hip implants; and the British firm Sutrue is developing customized 3D-printed instruments for surgeons.

Last year, GE Healthcare’s Voluson scanner became the first ultrasound machine that can send digital images directly to a 3D printer, which can then print them, layer by layer, from the file. The business unit also is developing 3D-printed tools that pharma companies could use to manufacture biopharmaceuticals, a new class of drugs designed to treat a variety of diseases including cancer and autoimmune ailments. Beacham says that in the future, as much as 70 percent of components for GE Healthcare machines will involve 3D printing in some shape or form.

We sat down with Beacham and his colleague Steven Abitz, principal advanced manufacturing engineer at GE Healthcare, to talk about the emerging field. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Top image: Beacham, Abitz and their team 3D printed a replica of a human heart using data from a medical scanner. Image credit: GE Healthcare. Above: A 3D printed skull implant. Image credit: Materialise.

GE Reports: 3D printing and other additive manufacturing methods are rapidly evolving. Tell us about the samples you brought with you.

Jimmie Beacham: The heart I am holding belongs to one of our employees. He had a CT scan; he asked for the data and brought it to us. We printed it from plastic and used it as an example of what’s possible. This object next to it is a model a model of a fetus made from ultrasound data. We can take data from the scanners and convert it to a file that’s printable.

GER: What are the benefits?

JB: 3D printing can benefit a lot of people. The doctors, when they are sitting down with a patient after the scan, can use the model to help people visualize what’s wrong with them, communicate more clearly and help make that connection. It can help surgeons with planning for a complex surgery. One of the things that’s challenging for surgeons is that not all the body parts are in the same place for everyone. When there’s an organ that’s at a weird angle or it’s got a different shape to it, they can actually see it and do a bit more planning, versus diving into the patient and finding out what’s going on.

“3D printing can benefit a lot of people,” says GE Healthcare’s Jimmy Beacham. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

GER: If we understand you correctly, not too far in the future, surgeons could be holding in their hands the organ they will be operating on before they go into surgery?

JB: A model of it, yes.

GER: You also are working on 3D printing components for the imaging machines themselves. What are the applications?

Steven Abitz: We typically look for applications where we have very complex assemblies. In some cases, we are also able to take weight out. One 3D-printed component for a device made by our Life Sciences business, for example, uses 80 percent less material than its predecessor. At the same time, we were also able to improve the part’s performance. 3D printing also allowed us to reduce the number of components for another part from over 200 down to one.

GER: You also brought with you this rectangular part that looks a little like a very fine honeycomb made from metal. What is it?

SA: It’s a collimator. We use it to filter radiation in our computed tomography scanners. Today, we glue them together by hand from some 200 little brittle tungsten plates.

Steven Abitz is holding a 3D-printed collimator. The part is typically made by glueing together 200 brittle tungsten plates. “By going to a printed solution, we basically eliminate all the assembly,” he says. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

GER: That sounds tedious.

SA: Right. By going to a printed solution, we basically eliminate all the assembly. We also make it more robust because we are printing it as one solid piece of material, so the quality is also better.

GER: What else do you use 3D printing for?

SA: We use it to accelerate our product design and development. You can print in a day or two any design you can think of and test it right away.

GER: The parts you showed us were 3D printed from metal, but this component looks like an antenna. What is it?

JB: This is a sensor and we made it on our “Direct Write” machine. It allows us to print electronics in 3D surfaces. We are looking at a lot of applications, printed antennas, heaters, sensors and other devices.

GER: What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered?

JB: Additive manufacturing is so new, and we have to get our engineers to understand it. It’s changing engineering so fast, there are almost two parts to an engineer’s career: before additive and after additive. When we look down the road, we see that nearly 70 percent of our subsystems for all of our components will be touched by additive manufacturing in one way or another. We are going to increase the speed with which engineers develop products and come up with better designs. There’s a lot more to come

Technologies like this “Direct Write” machine allows the GE Healthcare team to print electronics in 3D surfaces. Image credit: GE Healthcare.

Today, GE released its fourth-quarter results for 2017, reporting $0.27 of adjusted earnings per share. Significant one-time charges in the quarter—including an insurance charge, U.S. tax reform, and planned portfolio moves—totaled $1.49 of EPS, and excluding these charges, EPS was at the low end of guidance for the year at $1.05.

Cash in the fourth quarter was significantly higher than planned; industrial CFOA was $9.7 billion, versus guidance of $7 billion. About half of that was better execution and half was the timing of collections moving into the quarter from 2018. Visibility and execution on cash is improving. GE reduced structural cost by $1.7 billion for the year, versus an initial target of $1 billion.

“Our results this quarter demonstrate some of the early progress we are seeing from our key initiatives,” said GE Chairman and CEO John Flannery. “The team is focused on operational execution, capital allocation and deep cost reduction to position us for continued improvement in 2018.”

Top: GE started testing the GE9X, the world’s largest jet engine. GE Aviation developed the engine for Boeing’s next-generation 777X passenger jets. Image credit: GE Aviation. Above: GE Renewable’s 6-megawatt offshore Haliade wind turbine. Five of these turbines power America’s first offshore wind farm near Block Island, Rhode Island. Image credit: GE Renewables.

GE’s Aviation and Healthcare units drove strong orders and margins in the quarter. Digital had a strong performance with Predix-powered orders up 41 percent. Power earnings were down 88 percent, driven by the market, execution misses, and adjustments. The business will continue to be a work in progress throughout 2018.

GE highlighted several deals and important partnerships from the quarter. GE Renewable Energy is partnering with GE Energy Financial Services to provide 179 wind turbines to the Markbygden wind farm in Sweden, the largest single-site onshore wind farm in Europe.

GE Healthcare announced a partnership with Roche to integrate both in vitro and in vivo patient data in real time to enable faster diagnosis and decision support. The partnership will initially focus on products that accelerate and improve individualized treatment options for cancer and critical care patients.

Materials for the event are now available on GE’s investor website. Sign up for GE’s investor newsletter to learn more over the coming weeks.

Dave Seiwert was fresh out of high school in 1956 when he got the opportunity of a lifetime. In his parents’ garage, the 18-year-old built a 30-pound, 3-foot-long ramjet — a jet engine that uses forward motion to compress incoming air — and entered it into a local Youth Opportunity Day engineering competition. He won first place and with it an internship at GE’s Jet Engine Department in Evendale, Ohio.

When engineers at GE heard about the ramjet, they urged him to bring it in for a test. It turns out his little jet could be capable of moving at 350 miles per hour, so fast that GE’s Monogram magazine published a story about the intern and his marvelous machine. “His tiny ramjet’s big-time performance has convinced him: He’ll be an aeronautical engineer — at General Electric,” the story stated.

The sentence presaged the next six decades of Seiwert’s life. He joined GE Aviation and watched the jet age take off. You could say that Seiwert has seen it all. He started working on engines for America’s early fighter jets and finished with the LEAP, an engine that includes 3D-printed parts and components from space-age ceramic composites. In between, he took a detour into space.

Above: A pair of LEAP-1B engine powering Boeing next-generation 737 MAX jet. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports. Top: Dave Seiwert was 18 years old when he built a 30-pound, 3-foot-long ramjet in his parents garage. The engine led to a career at GE Aviation that span nearly the entire jet age. Image credit: Dave Seiwert.

Seiwert had always had his eye on the future. He got his engineering degree while working part time at GE, and used the company’s test cells while writing his thesis on hypersonic flow — a theoretical physics problem studying shockwaves and how they affect jet engines. “It was really surprising that they let me do that,” says Seiwert. “Of course, there weren’t that many lawyers back in those days!”

In 1962, Seiwert went to work full time at GE, where he used what he’d learned on that project to help design the thrust reverser for the engines that powered the huge airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft that the U.S. Air Force used to keep tabs on the Soviet Union’s air activity.

While Seiwert was working on military planes, America’s commercial air travel industry was taking off. Soon, as technology originally developed for military engines started entering civilian aviation, GE enlisted Seiwert to work on engines for commercial jets like the Boeing 747 and the McDonnell Douglass DC-10.

Dave Seiwert next to a GP7200 engine powering an Airbus A380. Image credit: Dave Seiwert.

But he was far from finished. Tasked with helping to develop Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Star Wars” missile defense program in the ’80s, his team came up with “Turbo Machinery in Space,” a plan that coupled a nuclear-powered turbine with a laser to shoot down incoming missiles. The idea was to deploy 400 of these satellites into space. “I had my doubts about having 400 nuclear reactors flying around in space, but we went ahead and worked on them for about three years,” Seiwert says.

Seiwert, now 78, continued to work on engine design for the Airbus A380 double-decker plane — the world’s largest passenger jet, which GE designed in partnership with Pratt & Whitney — until he retired in 2002. However, his retirement didn’t stick: “I was out for about four months, then I started climbing the walls,” he says. “I came back and worked on certification of the core engine design for the GP7200.”

He then went on to work on the LEAP engine, which was developed by CFM International — a 50-50 joint venture between GE and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines. The LEAP is the best-selling engine in CFM’s history with $200 billion in sales so far (U.S. list price).

Seiwert helped test the engine’s ability to withstand crosswinds. Severe crosswinds during takeoff can distort an engine’s fan and cause it to stall. At GE’s testing ground in Peebles, Ohio, he put the LEAP engine through its paces to ensure that it could take off in high crosswind levels.

“It impressed me how far we’ve come since 1965,” says Seiwert. “It’s amazing how much better the engines are from a safety and reliability point of view.”

Finally, in 2015, he retired for good. “You spend 59 and a half years in one place, you’re going to have a lot of stories,” he laughs.

The fever and frenzy gripping the bitcoin market may ultimately curtail the digital currency’s appeal. But the smart money is already betting on blockchain, the technology that allowed bitcoin to take off in the first place.

Blockchain is the global digital ledger, or “trust protocol,” that keeps a chronological record of all transactions. Any asset, whether it’s bitcoin or bananas, can have its own blockchain that records information about transactions that have taken place. “At its most basic, it is an open source code: anyone can download it for free, run it, and use it to develop new tools for managing transactions online,” write Don and Alex Tapscott in their book “Blockchain Revolution.” “As such, it holds the potential for unleashing countless new applications and as yet unrealized capabilities that have the potential to transform many things.”

The market for renewables could be one of them. Engineers at GE Global Research are looking for ways to use blockchain to connect consumers and producers of electricity with batteries supplied by wind and solar farms. “Through blockchain, we think there’s an opportunity to create a marketplace where we can connect these participants,” says John Carbone, a principal engineer at GE Global Research. “We try to pull them all together in a way that increases the reliability and access to renewable electricity.”

Renewable energy has many benefits. The raw materials that fuel it are free, and the power they produce is much cleaner than electricity from conventional gas- and coal-fired plants. The downside is that wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. The system the GE team is developing would allow homeowners and businesses who want to maximize their use of renewable energy to order it up, reliably, from batteries supplied by wind or solar farms.

Blockchain “holds the potential for unleashing countless new applications and as yet unrealized capabilities that have the potential to transform many things,” write Don and Alex Tapscott in their book “Blockchain Revolution.” Top and above images credit: Shutterstock.

Batteries and other hybrid storage solutions already are starting to pop up around the world. GE’s “renewable energy blockchain” allows the team to track the amount of power stored and released from the battery, just like coins in your bitcoin or Ethereum wallet, monitor the demand on the grid, and use smart contracts to buy and sell electricity. “You could buy kilowatts of energy immediately using a digital currency and a smart contract that make sure that you don’t overwork the battery or consume more power than you need,” said Ben Beckmann, the lead scientist in GE Global Research’s complex systems engineering lab.

Using blockchain, the team was able to create smart contracts that allow operators to write simple rules managing, say, how much money they want to spend on electricity, how many kilowatts they want to buy, and at what price. “It’s like a bank account that’s controlled by software,” Beckmann says. “You can automate all the deposits and withdrawals from the account, whether it be money, energy, or something else.”

A very simple way to think about it is the gas tank in your car, Beckmann says. “You get in your car every day and drive to work and back,” he says. “The engine transacts with the gas tank and draws energy from it, but you are only concerned with putting gas into the tank once a week. The tank is your car’s energy account that buffers your interactions with your car and makes the process smooth.”

The automated system executes the transaction according to the smart contract, which lives on the network and prescribes the price for electricity the consumer is willing to pay. The system checks this limit against the amount of power currently available in the battery, the demand for it and the amount of money in the consumer’s account. “If one of the conditions isn’t met, the system is going to alert me: ‘Hey, do you still want to proceed, or do you want me to do something else?’ ” Beckmann says.

Rather than requiring people to interact with other people, which can be slow and complicated, the system connects home devices into a smart network “that is more efficient and distributing electricity to those who need and benefiting everyone,” Carbone says. “Imagine if your thermostat knew your temperature preferences. It would buy electricity for you at the best available price. Now imagine if it could communicate with all of the appliances in your household as well as pull in outside data to coordinate the most efficient use of electricity. Perhaps it’s going to be hot today with air conditioning causing prices to spike, so the system could suggest to the dryer to run at a later schedule. This digital ecosystem could coordinate all of that.”

“Through blockchain, we think there’s an opportunity to create a marketplace where we can connect these participants,” says John Carbone, a principal engineer at GE Global Research. “We try to pull them all together in a way that increases the reliability and access to renewable electricity.” Image credit: Shutterstock.

There are other benefits. Beckmann and Carbone say that the system could allow battery owners to set the rules for how the battery participates in the energy exchange. If it’s windy at night and demand is low, the battery might be recharging itself or offering power at a low price to free up storage capacity in the battery. “It could be programmed to optimize its utility, make the most money from buying and selling energy,” Carbone says.

But the engineers say that communities also can set up the system to maximize the amount of renewable energy available. “Now it’s not selfishly trying to generate as much money as possible,” Beckmann says. “It’s trying to be more magnanimous and keep the battery alive for as long as possible.”

The team already has built a working model of the system at the Forge Lab located in GE’s research headquarters in Niskayuna, New York. It uses a computer originally designed to mine the Ethereum cryptocurrency as its brain. The computer is connected to tiny Raspberry Pi and Arduino processors they bought online for $30 each that simulate smart thermostats, lights and other home devices. “You don’t need to start from scratch to build this,” Carbone says. “What you need in your house is pretty simple technology that already exists. There’s a whole ecosystem of devices that could connect to this energy marketplace, whether it’s charging stands for electric vehicles, smart meters, thermostats — it could really be any electric device you can imagine.”

The team has big hopes for blockchain. It believes that the current vagaries of bitcoin are not indicative of blockchain’s future, because cryptocurrency is just the technology’s first application. “It will be of those things where you look back and reflect on the way you used to do it,” Beckmann says. “Everybody used to have a landline telephone, but you probably can’t put a date on when you stopped using it. It just happened. Blockchain is this type of technology that comes in waves. It will happen, absolutely, whether we are there to take advantage of it or not.”

Contact lenses tracked rabbits’ blood-glucose levels through their tears. A new drug silenced the “siren call” that helps cancers grow. And a carnivorous plant inspired a repellent to keep ship hulls free of gunk. We’ve got quite a haul this week, mateys. Anchors aweigh!

Sugar-Sensing Contacts

What is it? Researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have designed a contact lens that can monitor the amount of glucose in tears and warn wearers of dangerous spikes or drops.

Why does it matter? Many people with diabetes have to prick their fingers throughout the day to gauge the amount of glucose in their blood. “Smart” contacts could provide a pain-free alternative.

How does it work? A team led by Jihun Park, a materials scientist at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, created a lens made of soft and flexible electronic materials. The lens’ components can convert radiofrequency signals from a nearby transmitter into electricity, which powers a glucose sensor and a small green light. This persistent LED, which is visible to the wearer in a mirror but doesn’t interfere with vision, only turns off when the sensor picks up elevated glucose in the tear film. The team said that the lenses accurately tracked glucose levels in tests on rabbits.

Pressing The Mute Button On Cancer

Above: Researchers in Georgia are exploring a new way to treat cancer that blocks production of a chemical tumors produce to recruit cells to help it grow and spread. Image credit: Phil Jones, senior photographer at Augusta University. Top GIF credit: Science.

What is it? Scientists at Augusta University in Georgia say they’ve found a way to silence the “siren call” that aggressive cancers such as glioblastoma and metastatic breast cancer send the bone marrow to signal the production of materials tumors need to survive and spread.

Why does it matter? Tumors pump out high levels of 20-HETE, an ordinarily helpful chemical involved in mediating blood pressure, blood flow and inflammation — triggering the release of cytokines. These compounds summon bone marrow cells, which then get busy helping the cancer live and grow. “This includes bolstering the primary tumor site and in the case of breast cancer, helping prepare remote sites in places like the brain, lung and liver,” said Dr. B.R. Achyut, a cancer biologist at Augusta University’s Medical College of Georgia. The authors noted that while chemotherapy on its own does kill tumor cells, their death signals the release of more cytokines, “as another cry for survival, which is another good reason to also directly target the call for assistance that tumors are sending,” according to Dr. Ali S. Arbab, senior author on two articles tied to the research.

How does it work? The team surmised that blocking 20-HETE would inhibit the process outlined above. It alternated chemotherapy treatments with a 20-HETE inhibitor called HET0016. Rats with glioblastoma who received the drug in conjunction with chemotherapy lived for six months or longer, compared with the mere weeks they’d otherwise be expected to survive. Breast cancer findings were also promising. “There was less communication between the tumor’s base camp and these deadly satellite locations,” according to Augusta University. “When they examined the lungs, they saw fewer cytokines to summon the bone marrow cells and fewer enzymes that also support invasiveness of the breast cancer cells.” The team published its results in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.

An App To Help Prevent Falls

What is it? Researchers at Spains’ Universitat Politècnica de València have create a fall-risk assessment system that takes the guesswork out of determining which elderly patients are most liable to fall.

Why does it matter? Nearly a third of people older than 65 and half over 80 fall at least once per year, according to the team that created the FallSkip system. These falls frequently result in painful, expensive and potentially life-threatening injuries, such as broken hips. Armed with an objective risk score, the FallSkip team says, doctors can prescribe preventive measures such as occupational therapy, prescription eyeglasses, or the use of stability devices.

How does it work? Doctors load the app — installed on an Android mobile device — with the patient’s basic information, including age, gender and health record. Then, while wearing a wide belt equipped with an accelerometer and gyroscope, the patient undergoes a 2-minute series of motions that provide the app with data about balance, gait, reaction time and other factors. Based on that, it assigns a risk score that aligns with the commonly used Timed Up and Go screening test.

Feed me, Seymour!

A new coating for keeping organic matter from glomming on to ships channels the evil genius of the pitcher plant. Image credit: The University of Sydney

What Is It? Researchers at the University of Sydney Nano Institute say they’ve created a new nanomaterial, inspired by a carnivorous plant, that can prevent organisms from attaching to ship hulls and marine equipment.

Why does it matter? The accumulation of bacteria, plants, and algae on submerged surfaces, increases drag on ships, which then need more fuel to complete their voyages. A previously used a powerful biocide called tributyltin was retired in 2007 because of environmental concerns. Since then, the shipping industry has been adrift without a solution — to the tune of $320 million in extra costs each year in Australia alone, according to a University of Sydney news release. “Biofouling — the build-up of damaging biological material – is a huge economic issue, costing the aquaculture and shipping industries billions of dollars a year in maintenance and extra fuel usage,” the university said.

How does it work? The Nepenthes pitcher plant produces a slippery aqueous layer that allows its tiny victims to slide inside to their doom. Likewise, the Australian team’s nanowrinkles have a lubricating layer that keeps organisms from sticking to ships, nets, marine sensors and other marine surfaces that stay wet for a long time. “In the lab, the slippery surfaces resisted almost all fouling from a common species of marine bacteria, while control Teflon samples without the lubricating layer were completely fouled,” the university said. Tests in the wild also buoyed hopes for the solution. “The infused surfaces displayed stability in seawater and inhibited growth of Pseudoalteromonas spp. bacteria up to 99%,” the team wrote in its findings, which appear in Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Self-Healing Machine Parts

New “self-repairing” ceramic material can fix cracks on its own “in just a minute.” Images credit: Shutterstock.

What is it? Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan and Yokohama National University developed a “self-repairing” ceramic material that can fix cracks on its own “in just a minute,” according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Why does it matter? Engineers have already started using special ceramic materials to make turbines and engines more efficient. The new approach “could drastically change manufacturing methods for the transportation industry,” according to the paper.

How does it work? The key to the new approach involves adding silicon carbide to parts made from aluminum oxide. “When the ceramic cracked at high temperatures, the silicon carbide was exposed to air and turned into silicon dioxide that filled in the crack and repaired the damage,” according to the paper.

GE engineers recently built and tested 30 different prototypes of a complex, football-size jet engine component. Thanks to cutting-edge 3D-printing technology, they were able to reach the perfect design in just 12 weeks. This is remarkable considering it would take several years to iterate on that many designs using traditional casting methods.

The team, which included engineers from GE Global Research, GE Aviation and GE Additive, used a 3D printing technology called binder jet. It works a lot like an inkjet printer in your home office. But instead of depositing ink to form words and pictures on a flat sheet of paper, the binder jet printer lays down a special proprietary binder or “glue” to form complex parts on a flat bed of metal powder, one layer after another.

The research already sparked a new product line for GE Additive, the GE business focusing on 3D printing and similar technologies. In December, the unit unveiled its own scalable 3D binder jet printer that it built in just 47 days.

In some ways, the binder jet technology is similar to GE’s laser-powered 3D metal printers, which use beams of light to melt and fuse layers of metal powder. The key difference is that the binder jet uses a binding agent to make the metal powder stick together, just like bakers use eggs to keep their pastries from collapsing. Another difference: A binder jet machine can print at least 10 times faster than laser-based methods and also can produce larger parts.

Top and above: GE Additive built a binder jet printer in just 47 days. A binder jet machine can print at least 10 times faster than laser-based methods and also can produce larger parts. Images credit: GE Additive.

This process also needs much less energy to print parts, compared with laser metal printers. “Instead of firing high-power lasers over a bed of metal powder, we’re depositing a binder glue like ink on paper,” said Arunkumar Natarajan, a senior scientist at GE Global Research and technical lead for the binder jet program. The technology is so fast and powerful, Natarajan said, it could disrupt the multibillion-dollar casting industry.

“We pulled from across the GE Research Lab’s deep material and chemistry expertise to develop a special binder that is core to the success of the process,” said Natarajan. “We’re very excited about the binder jet concept, given the opportunity it provides for faster printing of more parts versus other additive and even conventional manufacturing techniques.”

Unlike laser-printed metal parts, however, metal parts made on the binder jet require more extensive post-processing. The printed metal part initially comes out in a fragile state it must be cured — essentially baked in an industrial oven to achieve the right shape and make it strong and durable, just like a piece of metal. “We already have successfully printed several complex metal test parts, using this advanced binder jet process,” Natarajan said.

From left to right: Ananda Barua, Arunkumar Natarajan, Ken Salas, Meghan Borz, Raymond Martell, holding the LEAP engine flowpath component printed on a binder jet. Not pictured are: Etienne Martin, Pong Chan, Vadim Bromberg, Mike DeSylva and Satyanarayan Raghavanan who also are key members of technical team. Image credit: GE Global Research.

Ken Salas, an additive platform leader at GE Global Research, and Ray Martell, a principal engineer at GE Aviation, led the advanced technology team that used a binder jet process to print the football-size component for the LEAP jet engine developed by CFM International, a 50-50 joint venture between GE Aviation and Safran Aircraft Engines. They say this technology could print even larger parts.

It took the design team several years to develop the original part, using casting and other traditional methods to produce it. The binder jet allowed them to iterate quickly, and print and test three dozen designs that met all the required heat and durability limits in just three months. “This flowpath component is a difficult part to manufacture due to the strict alloy requirements and complex geometry,” Martell said. “A binder jet is capable of meeting these challenges at a significant cost advantage to legacy processes.”

Added Salas: “To iterate on more than 30 different designs in casting would be impractical. For one, it would be too expensive. But beyond that, it would take several years to complete.”

The binder jet project itself evolved fast, starting less than a year ago as a small back-room research program. Today, GE believes it could deliver the LEAP program tens of millions of dollars in cost savings and disruption of the structural casting industry.

Thomas Edison lost much of his hearing when he was still a child. “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old,” he once remarked. But that did not stop him from inventing the phonograph in 1877, a device that for the first time recorded sounds and played them back. He was just 29 years old and the lightbulb was still in his future.

The phonograph created a whole new way of experiencing the world through sound. In 1958, when the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was thinking about naming their music industry awards, one suggestion was the Eddie to honor Edison’s contribution. The Academy eventually decided on Grammy, after the gramophone. The 60th Annual Grammy Awards took place in New York on Sunday.

Above: A drawing from 1878 of Edison speaking into the sound collector of his tinfoil phonogram, the first device that could record and also play back sounds. The frenchman Éduoard Léon-Scott made the phonoautogram, the first recording-only machine in 1857. Top image: Edison with his phonogram. Images credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

Edison came up with the device by drawing on his knowledge of the telegraph and the telephone. “I was experimenting on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking machine of today,” Edison told a biographer. “From my experiments on the telephone I knew the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations. Instead of using a disk, I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was placed tin foil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm.” He recorded the movements of the diaphragm with a needle.

As was his habit with new inventions, Edison immediately estimated the price people would pay for the machine. He guessed $18 – the equivalent of $390 today. He then asked a worker named John Kruesi to make it from his sketch. “I did not have much faith that it would work, expecting I might possibly hear a word or so that would give hope for the future of the idea,“ Edison told a biographer. “Kruesi, when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking and then have the machine talk back. He thought it was absurd. After it was finished the foil was put on. I then shouted ‘Mary had a little lamb, etc.’ I adjusted the reproducer and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken back in my life. ”

Copies of the original sketches Edison made for his employee John Kruesi. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The device made Edison immediately famous and sealed his reputation as the “Inventor of the Age” and led to his nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” On April 18, 1878, he even traveled to the White House at the request of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who wanted to see the machine. Many of Edison’s recordings have survived and have been digitized as mp3 files. You can listen to them online.

Edison’s close associates Sigmund Bergmann (left) and Charles Batchelor pose with Edison (seated) and his tinfoil phonograph 1878. Image credit: Museum Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison’s first phonograph from 1877. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The mouthpiece used for recording voice. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

A sketch of a woman speaking into a phonograph. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

An early phonograph drawing. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison with his wax cylinder machine. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

Edison later switched to wax cylinders. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady.

The invention also allowed Edison to crack the toy market and start selling talking dolls. Image credit: Robin and Joan Rolfs

Thirty years ago, Vietnam was in a deep economic crisis. Still struggling to recover from the war, much of the country was living in abject poverty. It wasn’t unusual to walk into a home and find people without electricity. Hyperinflation of 775 percent meant that people had to wait in long lines and bring piles of money to pay for even the most basic goods.

Around that same time, Vietsovpetro, a joint venture between Vietnam and Russia, built a gas platform 100 kilometers off the shores of Vietnam. Located on top of an undersea natural gas field, the platform has pulled gas from 100 meters below the waves ever since helping to fuel an economic renaissance in Vietnam. Today Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia — 99 percent of the country has power and demand for electricity is rising by 11 percent per year.

But for the most part, Vietsovpetro’s platform is still operating with aging equipment. That hasn’t been a problem until recently, when the company discovered extra pockets of gas near their platform. Vietsovpetro had three choices for how to handle the discovery: continue pumping gas at the same rate, extend the platform to allow for increased capacity or make the existing platform more efficient so it could pump a greater volume of gas without growing its footprint.

Vietsovpetro knew they wanted to increase capacity but they were worried about the cost and time needed to make the platform bigger.

“If they were feeding gas to one power station before, now they could pump at a higher rate or send gas to a new power plant — wherever that gas could be utilized,” says Khurram Majeed, vice president for turbomachinery and process solutions APAC at Baker Hughes, a GE company. “We looked at the space and we saw we could fit our equipment in so they wouldn’t have to extend the platform.”

Above: 3D printer working at a BHGE plant in Talamona, Italy. Image credit: BHGE. Top: Vietnam needs energy to fuel its economic revival. Image credit: Shutterstock.

BHGE’s secret weapon was the NovaLT16 gas turbine. Engineers were able to snugly fit the turbine onto the existing platform to increase the amount of gas flowing from the platform to the mainland.

The turbine helps by powering a compressor that increases the pressure of the gas as it enters the pipeline to shore. The high-pressure compressed gas moves faster and more smoothly. That means that Vietsovpetro can move more gas in a shorter time, helping to fuel new growth in Vietnam.

This is the first time one of these turbines will be installed on an offshore platform, and Vietsovpetro found it a particularly good fit because of its efficiency. Built and designed in Florence, Italy, partially with 3D-printed parts, the turbine can run for four years before it needs to be taken offline for maintenance. The gas engine that was previously powering the compressor on the platform had to undergo maintenance roughly once a year, a process that can cost valuable time and money.

“Inside a gas turbine, all the metal is continually exposed to high pressure and temperatures,” says Majeed. “Hence the need for shutting it down for maintenance so often. But if you can improve the metallurgy of the parts and the overall design, you can increase the time between maintenance.”

This 3D-printed gas turbine swirler pushes the fuel mix into the burner. Image credit: BHGE.

The turbine is superefficient and consumes less fuel to generate the same output power as the next-best turbine on the market, with 37 percent mechanical efficiency, compared to the industry average of 36.2 percent.

The NovaLT16 also features 3D-printed parts. Manufactured in GE Additive’s facility in picturesque Talamona, Italy, near the northern tip of Lake Como, the turbine’s swirler is a deceptively important part of the turbine. Just 4 inches in diameter with blades on the inside, the swirler burns a mixture of fuel and air to power the turbine. Small changes in the shape of the blade can bring large fuel savings. Engineers at Talamona were able to use the quick prototyping capabilities of additive manufacturing to experiment with different small changes to make the swirler as efficient as possible.

They then constructed the part using laser-powered printers called direct metal laser melting machines, which break down CAD files and create the piece as one part, using lasers to fuse one fine layer of metal powder after another in the right design pattern.

It’s a tiny part, but for the people of Vietnam, it’s making a huge difference as they benefit from the economic boom being helped along by Vietsovpetro’s gas platform.