WEMPEC is an internationally renowned engineering research group sponsored by 80+ companies including GE Global Research. With over 300 participants, the review meeting rivaled a decent sized IEEE conference. WEMPEC and GE have a long history, including past tenures at Global Research by key members of WEMPEC. This includes Professor Tom Lipo and Professor Tom Jahns, who incidentally, is a predecessor in my current job—about 20 years ago!

Many presentations and posters piqued my interest at the meeting but below I wanted to highlight and share thoughts around three in particular.

1.    Resonant power transfer at multi-kW over a 30 cm distance with an efficiency of over 90%. Grad student Seung Hwan Lee is working with Prof R.D. Lorenz on lowering the field level for safety reasons and compensating by going to frequencies above 1MHz. If the team can minimize both the ac losses in the copper and the dielectric losses in the substrate, this would be very interesting for multiple applications.

2.    Continuing work on motor drive based gear train fault detection, from where Global Research’s Kum-Kang left off. The team is starting to leverage the very rich data already available in the motor drive controls for multiple diagnostic purposes.

3.    Concerns about the impact of rare-earth availability on the PM machine industry addressed by Prof. Tom Jahns in his talk on “PM Machines at the Crossroads: Where Do We Go From Here?” I thought he was right on with his prediction that the industry will be more selective in the application of rare-earth PM to motors, but we can be sure they are not going away.

It was very energizing to interact with the broad spectrum of participants from top notch, highly motivated students, to world-class professors and large industry partners. I was very impressed by the passion and energy in the energy conversion industry and the great advances being made in this space. I look forward to next year’s event!

Seung Hwan Lee describing MHz resonant wireless power transfer

Prof. Tom Jahns and me in front of an F150 truck that has been converted into a fully electric drivetrain.

The project, “High Penetration of Photovoltaic Generation Study – Flagstaff Community Power” is a part of the Department of Energy’s High Penetration Solar Deployment Program.  It is built upon a larger pilot project launched by Arizona Public Service in Flagstaff (APS Community Power Project). Approximately 1.5MW of solar generation has been installed along the Sandvig 4 feeder in Flagstaff. Participating residential customers host a total of 1000kW of distributed PV: 600kW is installed as residential rooftop systems sized 2-4kW, and 400kW as larger commercial/industrial systems sized 50-150kW. The remaining 500kW is hosted by APS and installed as a small solar farm located on the feeder. The data collected on this project will enable APS to evaluate how distributed energy impacts its system, and to define guidelines for the design of similar systems in the future.

GE’s collaboration with APS on the High Penetration of Photovoltaic Generation Study provides us with a unique opportunity to study the effects of increasing levels of PV penetration on a typical distribution feeder. The project team recently completed the Phase 2 review with the DoE at APS headquarters in Phoenix, AZ.  The GE 700kW Brilliance Inverter with advanced grid features including low voltage ride through and voltage support has been deployed on the 500kW solar farm and the GE project team was able to show the impact of the inverter on the distribution feeder.  GE Energy Consulting provided system impact and performance evaluation studies including an evaluation of the impact of distributed PV generation on the feeder voltage.  One of the most interesting aspects of this project for GE is that the data acquisition systems designed for this project allows us to see things at a fidelity unequaled to date.  The specially designed data acquisition systems have been deployed at the substation, seven weather stations, 13 residential PV locations and 6 feeder data acquisition systems evenly distributed across the feeder. These DASs collect data at a high sample rate, are set up for cross-triggering, and are directly integrated to the utility data historian, which allows us to rigorously compare and validate our models against actual data from the utility feeder.

These results can then be extrapolated to help us to understand other systems, even those that may be significantly larger in scale, and working on this project with APS has also helped our research team to better understand how our products are used by our customers.

Phase 3 of the project is coming soon.  We will have the chance to demonstrate our advanced grid features on the feeder and characterize the results. Ultimately the project team hopes to write a handbook on how to integrate PV into the US distribution grid most effectively and at the lowest cost.

It’s been a long (way too long) time since I had the chance to provide some details on what I’ve been up to here at the Research Center. As many of you know, I’ve been working on the Big Data team here and working with many GE Businesses such as GE Energy, GE Intelligent Platforms and our new Software & Analytics center in San Ramon CA.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been traveling all over, including the Boston and Washington D.C. areas. My latest trip was to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana-Champaign, IL. NCSA is developing and exploring innovative architectures and techniques to accelerate scientific computing. If you’d like to learn more about the center, check out NCSA’s website.

NCSA held its annual Private Sector Partnership meeting last week, which included companies such as GE, Adaptive Computing, ADM, Boeing, BP, Caterpillar, John Deere, Dell, IllinoisRocstar, Microsoft, Nimbis Services,Nokia Siemens Networks, Procter & Gamble, Rolls-Royce, Waterborne Environmental, and John Zink.
Discussions were held around topics including the current and future state of high performance computing, data storage and analysis and workflow management. Several members from GE Global Research were asked to express thoughts on panels in addition to attending the event. I was on the panel entitled “BIG Data What are the Challenges Just what is Possible?”

The panel included members from the NCSA, the Mayo Clinic, the HDF Group. We gave thoughts to some great questions around big data, ranging from what exactly big data is to what are some of the challenges, opportunities and long-term impacts. These questions are complex by themselves, but to add on, I drew the short straw and was the first panelist to speak!

What is big data? The moderator asked.

As I opened up the discussion, I brought up all aspects that I feel constitute Big Data. That is the data itself, the solutions available, the analytics that are executed on the data and finally, data federation. I discussed scenarios, stating that Big Data is really relative. For example, 50TB of data might be considered big, simply because of the storage and retrieval costs. But 500 GB could be big when we think about patient medical records and a doctor who asks, ‘is my patient prone to disease x in the next 5 years?’

I’d be very interested to hear what you all think the term ‘Big Data’ refers to! This is an evolving field that is ever changing and it feels as though the definition has evolved with the changes as well. As always, comments are welcome below, or you can find me on Twitter (@CTMcConnell) or EdisonsDesk (@EdisonsDesk) and they’ll make sure I get the message!

Until next time,
Chris

Not much, except for being able to meet, learn AND share what I’ve been working on!

My talk is titled Making stuff Social.

How will we do Engineering, Design, and Manufacturing in the future? The digital social constructs of today are growing in all the right places. The creative process is fundamentally the same whether you are creating a new piece of music, a robot to clean your grill or a new type of CT scanner. Because of this social revolution, the line that separates artists and engineers is becoming blurry and this is to everyone’s advantage.

If you’ll be attending, I hope you’ll stop by and listen. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic. If you won’t be able to attend, I will be tweeting throughout the weekend, so feel free to follow me via @charlestheurer. I’ll also be spending time at GE’s manufacturing co-lab, GE Garages, so be sure to stop by there as well. Finally, below is a short video capturing my thoughts around the maker movement. I’ve been a MAKE fan since issue #1, so its an honor to attend.

Looking forward to meeting, sharing and learning!

Question from fan Nicolas Roux:

“How close are we to making nuclear fusion a reality?”

Response from Chief Scientist Jim Bray:

Nuclear fusion is the process whereby 2 lighter atoms combine (fuse) their nuclei to produce a heavier atom. This process often produces a lot of energy for lighter combining atoms, since some mass is converted to energy during the fusion process. We can say that nuclear fusion is certainly a reality now, since it provides the energy that causes all the stars shine; all stars are powered by fusion of light elements like hydrogen. It is also a reality here on earth, since it is the method by which thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs) work. So we now get to what we suppose Nicolas is asking: how close are we to making nuclear fusion a viable controlled power source for commercial power needs on earth?

This is a very hard problem because, in order to fuse the nuclei of atoms of a material, we must raise the temperature to many millions of degrees. There is no container for such temperatures, so physicists resort to using containing magnetic fields or quick energy inputs to try to raise the temperatures before the hot materials escape. The experiments and equipment are so complex and expensive that many nations have banded together to make a large experiment (using magnetic fields) called ITER in France. This experiment will not begin until around 2020 and will not produce commercial power. It will take a number of years after that to produce a plant to make commercial power, so we can guess that at least 25 more years will be needed. Another experiment in the US at Lawrence Livermore National Lab is producing fusion by quick energy input (by lasers) into materials. It is supposed to begin working this year, but it is also not going to produce any commercial power. 25 years might also be a good guess at how long it would take to commercialize that approach. So, in summary, no one knows for sure when fusion will be a reality for commercial power on earth. The problem is a hard one and the equipment is very expensive. The numbers I have given are just guesses.

“A scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a bamboo plant’s broken surface. The image reveals numerous channels (with different sizes) for water transport by capillary motion that enables the bamboo plant to grow. A porous “composite” structure as seen in the image would help in engineering structural materials capable of carrying fluids or gases internally.”

However, as always, what do you see here??

Have you ever been sitting in your car in the parking lot of the grocery store, minding your own business, when suddenly you see a rogue shopping cart go rolling at full speed, only to be abruptly stopped when it runs into some poor unsuspecting stranger’s car door?  For most normal people, their first thought is, “Oooo.  Bummer.  That’s gonna leave a mark!”  For me, my second thought is typically, “Hmm.  I wonder what the strain field would look like around that ding.”  (But then again, I’ve never claimed to be “normal”.) 

The majority of the work I do here at GE Global Research focuses on measuring “plastic strain” (as in…how much plastic strain did the grocery cart just put in the car door?).  Although I’ve never actually looked at a car door dent in my microscope, the concept is pretty much the same – I use a technique called Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) to look at various metals that have undergone some type of deformation process, then get a general idea of how much plastic strain or damage was introduced into the metal.  (For anyone that read my previous blog entries, these are the same type of measurements I made on the Space Shuttle bolts .)  Being able to measure plastic strain helps our understanding of how metals behave under certain conditions, and can also help us predict when a metal may fail.  I doubt that anyone has ever had their car door fall apart as a result of a shopping cart hit, but for the types of materials we work on here at GE, predicting the effects of plastic strain on things like aircraft engines and nuclear power plants is a pretty big deal!

Last year, my group held a contest to submit some of our work for a 2012 calendar, and I was lucky enough to have two of my images selected!  The January image is a “misorientation map” of a material in which we’re able to see fields of plastic strain produced by a second phase particle in a stainless steel.  What this means in plain English is the following:

I was looking at a stainless steel material when I noticed some weird, linear shaped particles in the matrix of the stainless steel.  (This was kind of a “Sesame Street” moment for me.  Remember the “One of these things is not like the other…” song?  Who knew that something I learned in elementary school would be useful when doing research?!?)  I knew that stainless steels have these particles, so I decided to have some fun and take a closer look at them (Figure 1.)

After getting a better look, I found that these particles had a different crystal structure than the stainless steel matrix, so I decided to collect a map of the area (Figure 2.)  Although the phase map is neat to look at, it doesn’t give me any real information about the plastic strain in the sample.  If I take the same data set and process it with a “misorientation” algorithm (developed here at GE Global Research), I get a different result – one that gives us insight into what the strain fields actually look like!  (Figure 3.)  So what exactly is this mysterious “misorientation” thing?  The term “misorientation” refers to a concept in crystallography where you measure the angles between two crystals.  Going back to our shopping cart and door dent example:  the car door had a certain orientation when it was sitting innocently in the parking lot (let’s call this “Orientation 1”).  Then along came the evil shopping cart and put a big dent in the door (this one will be “Orientation 2”).  The door now has a certain amount of distortion to it – a different shape than it originally was.  If we want to figure out how much the door has been deformed, we can calculate the difference between before and after the door was hit (or the difference between Orientation 1 and Orientation 2).

Misorientation is a little more complicated than this (and it occurs at a MUCH smaller scale!), but hopefully you get the general idea…it’s just a tool for us to measure strain.  In Figure 3 below, an area in red has high deformation (~10° or more), and an area with low deformation is blue.  What we learned from the measurements I made were that 1) we didn’t have a pure stainless steel matrix – we also had delta ferrite.  2)  In addition to having particles in the matrix, we can see from the misorientation map that the delta ferrite particles have a visible “plume” of strain coming off of them.  Ultimately, we learned that this material isn’t the composition that we thought it was, the delta ferrite particles were causing additional strain in the material.

Figure 1 (above): Backscatter electron images of particles.

Figure 2 (above): Phase map of delta ferrite particles (red) in a stainless steel matrix (blue).  This map is showing that the red and blue areas are crystallographically different.

Figure 3 (above):  Misorientation map of the same particles.  Note the red “plumes” of strain coming off of the delta ferrite particles.

Using the same technique, (EBSD for misorientation mapping) I measured a different material for the 2012 calendar’s July image (Figure 4).  This material is made from a cobalt alloy and during testing, the material ultimately failed.  (Cobalt alloys are typically used in high temperature corrosive environments .)  From the map below, we can see that there are multiple crack regions, plus there are areas of localized high strain (as indicated by the areas in red).

In the previous example, we were studying the material to prevent failure.  In this example, the material had already failed, but we needed to understand the mechanisms that lead to the failure.  In either situation, it makes for an interesting and colorful map.  (And I’ll bet that you never look at a grocery cart in a parking lot the same way now!)

Figure 4 (above):  EBSD misorientation map of a cobalt alloy.  Areas in black indicate regions where the material cracked, and ultimately failed.  Areas in red indicate localized regions of high strain.

Conceptualized at the company’s India Technology Center by Asokan T, a Chief Scientist at the Center, the Arc Vault represents a breakthrough in the area of electrical safety.  The arc vault works on the principle of transfer of an open arc flash to a safe containment.  The transfer of arc flash energy is accomplished by triggering an ablative plasma gun to generate a 3-phase fault within a safe containment.  The plasma gun operates in few tens of micro-seconds and the energy transfer occurs < 1milli-second.  The total duration (sensing, decision making and triggering) of arc vault to stop and contain a lethal arcing fault is less than eight milliseconds – as much as 10 times faster than conventional methods. This could result in lives saved and equipment being spared significant damage.

Statistics show arcing current is not only a dangerous problem, but a costly one for manufacturers.  According to engineering services company, ESA, there are as many as 10 incidents daily at plants in the U.S. resulting in losses of $1 billion annually.

“Arcing fault in electric systems is a major electrical hazard in the world.  The critical factors for arc fault protection are speed and reliability,” says Chief Scientist, T Asokan, who was recently made an IEEE fellow for his contributions to the development of innovative technologies for electrical safety and protection.  “GE’s arc vault technology deviates from conventional methods to achieve even faster responses to stop and contain dangerous arcing current.  I am delighted to see GE’s technology recognized so highly by the end users.”

Bob Vavra, editor of Plant Engineering magazine says, “Winners are selected by a vote of qualified Plant Engineering subscribers – the engineers who buy, specify and use these products on a daily basis. They are the most qualified people you can find to understand how new products reduce energy costs, ensure safety and improve productivity on the manufacturing plant floor. That’s why the Plant Engineering Product of the Year award is so highly regarded in our industry.”

The Arc Vault works by isolating the open or exposed arc and containing it. .  The system consists of an activation switch, a protective trip unit and a containment dome, all working together to provide fast protection from arc flash hazards. With the activation switch enabled, the trip unit will look for a current spike, and if necessary, trigger the containment dome and call for the main breaker to trip – stopping the deadly current before it can result in widespread explosion or fire. A secondary arc fault is created within the containment dome, which can extinguish the arc flash almost instantly. The secondary arc flash continues, protected in the containment dome, until the main breaker clears and de-energizes the entire system.

Congratulations to all members of the GE Global Research team who contributed to the development of the arc flash absorber technology.

In one of his blog entries (‘Waste heat recovery – the hidden source of energy’), Thomas Frey highlighted the potential efficiency gains in energy intensive industrial sectors such as refineries, steel and metal manufacturing plants, glass production processes, cement plants, furnaces, gas and pipeline stations and power plants (the list does not stop here) by recovering and reusing waste heat between processes. The nature of the original energy source can be very diverse, the use of its wasted part, however, can be captured by a rather small set of processes. This makes it so attractive. But keep in mind that even with a huge amount of energy available in the form of waste heat, the use of only a fraction of it might be interesting from an economical point of view. GE’s activity in this direction started in GE’s Global Research Center in Munich a couple of years ago and our team around Trevor Kirsten continuously extends its capabilities and scope.

At present GE offers two organic Rankine cycle solutions covering a large range of power output. The term ‘organic’ simply means that the working fluid in the process is organic in nature. The first cycle is the so-called Clean Cycle from GE Heat Recovery Solutions, which can generate up to 125kW electric power. This application is particularly attractive to generate extra power from gas engine exhaust gas, recover heat from industrial processes or generate power out of biomass boilers. The second one is the ORegen, which is offered by GE Oil and Gas and can generate up to 17MW electric power. This cycle fits very well to pipeline stations to recover waste heat from the exhaust stream of the gas turbine running the station compressor.

In what follows, I want to use the opportunity to present a simulation tool developed by one of my colleagues – Guillaume Becquin, which enables one to quickly estimate the feasibility of waste heat recovery from an industrial process, or better to say an industrial heat source. I believe that his methodology can be applied to various applications across GE technology.

Rather than spending a lot of time and money on the development of a process model for each potential waste heat recovery application, Guillaume formulated the modeling and simulation tool generic enough to be used on a large range of applications. He considered in particular the following metrics: predictive reliability, ease of use, speed, simple to distribute (no license requirements) and range of applicability. A first rough estimate of the potential power output from an industrial heat source can be obtained along with preliminary component sizing and cost estimates. The only information required from the user is the size of the heat source and heat sink. The graphical user interface makes it even more user-friendly and accessible. So far, the tool has been used in a temperature range from 100°C to 650°C and a power output from 100kWe to around 14MWe. The actual range is obviously larger. Only five minutes are needed to perform a full fluid screening analysis (investigating a series of fluids) whilst single fluid calculations can be obtained with less than one minute.

You can imagine that there is always a trade-off between the degree of customization of a simulation tool and the ease of its use. A key aspect of the waste heat recovery estimation tool was ease of use. Equations for each process component are therefore based on a standard thermodynamic textbook approach. The tool uses a set of high-accuracy equations of state for the organic working fluids. Additional fluids can be added to the tool.

The following cycles are covered in the simulation tool: (1) subcritical recuperated or non-recuperated cycle, (2) trilateral flash cycle, and (3) steam cycle. Figure 1 shows the general cycle configuration. The recuperator is optional because there are cases where the use of such a process component will not be beneficial, or even lead to reduced power output from the waste heat source. I want to stress that the objective of this simulation tool is not to compete with already existing tools, but rather complement them. It can thus be used to obtain preliminary estimates with respect to power output. Afterwards, commercial process simulation tools can be employed to validate and refine the initial calculations.

Not (yet) included in the simulation tool are advanced cycles with intermediate oil loops or multiple pressure levels and cascaded cycles, supercritical cycles, Kalina cycle, direct and dual flash geothermal cycles or any combination of those.

For the cost estimation of the entire waste heat recovery cycle, individual cost curves have been implemented. For heat exchanger assessment the area is the determining cost factor rather than the heat duty. The reason for that is simple, two heat exchangers with the same heat duty can have a very different log mean temperature difference and hence a different required area. In other words, the larger the area, the more material is being used. In many applications the most expensive process component is the expander. Auxiliary components such as frequency converter and electric drives have a rather small cost share within the total cost but have still been considered in the simulation tool for the sake of completeness. Moreover, additional internal boundary conditions have been incorporated, for instance limits for the minimal approach temperature difference of heat exchangers, pressure drops and realistic isentropic and electrical efficiencies to account for real system design limitations.

I think this simulation tool for waste heat recovery applications is very useful and the methodology behind it can be transferred to a number of technologies.

Please post your comments and questions and let the lively discussion begin!

References
[Becquin2011] Organic Rankine cycle preliminary performance estimation tool; Becquin G.; Internal technical report; Renewable Energy Systems lab; 2011.
[Martin1955] Development of an equation of state for gases; Martin J.J., Hou Y.-C.; AIChE Journal; v 1, n 2; 1955.

About 250 students have already benefited from this award since 2002 and this year, the award attracted over 70 innovation proposals from nine renowned universities, such as Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, etc.

This award is not new to some students including Haitao Yu. He is now a doctor candidate in Harbin Institute of Technology. He said, “I feel much honored to win the award, which is also a good recognition for my work in the past year. In the area of bionic robot, China lags behind. I will continue on this research and make my contributions in China’s catching up the international level.”

Funded by the GE Foundation and organized by GE China Technology Center and Institute of International Education, the GE Foundation TECH Award is designed to stimulate innovation in new technology, design, research methods and applications among university students in China. The award covers areas including energy, water, electronics and electrical engineering, machinery and mechanical processing, chemistry and material science. Compared with other scholarships and academic awards, the GE Foundation TECH Awards encourage graduate students and doctoral candidates to focus on market-oriented technology innovations for industrial application.

Dr. Xiangli Chen, the President of GE China Technology Center said, “GE boasts over 130 years of innovation, which is also the foundation for our work here. We attach importance not only to our own innovation, but also to collaborative innovation with other partners. Through GE TECH Award, we encourage university students to work hard in their research field to achieve more innovations benefiting our daily life in future.”

In addition to the award, future career development is also important to these university students who are facing graduation. Today, they could also learn from the career sharing presented by GE’s human resource managers and technology leaders, which gave the students a better understanding of planning their own career path. Biao Mao, a master student from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, said, “I would like to join a large corporation like GE after graduation to learn its multinational culture and corporate management. Today is very helpful for me to engage in research or create my own business in future.”

Fei Xu, Vice President of Shanghai Jiaotong University, said, “I would like to express our gratitude to the GE Foundation TECH Award for offering students a platform to showcase their capabilities. It also set a good example of cooperation model between corporate research and university education. Through active industry-academic interaction, companies like GE will offer leading technology development experience to China’s higher education.”

Question from fan Natalie Armstrong:

“Why can gravity hold a human down, but not completely?”

Response from Chief Scientist Jim Bray:

Gravity holds everything down on earth, not just humans. When Natalie asks “but not completely”, I suppose she is referring to the fact that we can force humans and other things up for a while, but they usually fall back to the ground. The faster we force or throw things up, the longer it takes for gravity to slow them down and pull them back to earth; you can check that out just by throwing a ball up with various speeds. Another fact is that gravity get weaker as an object gets higher.

When you combine those 2 facts and think about it, it becomes reasonable that, if we throw something (including a human) up fast enough, gravity might not be strong enough to ever pull it back to earth. That is exactly what happens, and we call that speed “escape velocity”. On earth, escape velocity is about 25,000 miles/hour, which is why we don’t see it happen much. However, our rockets can achieve this, which is why we can put humans into space or put satellites into space such that they never return to earth.

Escape velocity is determined by the strength of gravity on a celestial body, so it would be a much smaller number on our moon but much larger on planet Jupiter.

When I came to GE last year I didn’t realize the number and scale of opportunities I would have, both internal to GE and external.  One external opportunity is the DARPA vehicleforge.mil contract that we were awarded.  To get the contract a small team here at the research center collaborated with a professor at MIT to put together a proposal in support of DARPA’s upcoming Fast, Adaptable, Next Generation Vehicle Challenges.  During these challenges, DARPA asks the global community to collaborate and design a military vehicle.  You think this idea is outrageous? I did too, at first– but there is some precedent, see picture below.  Furthermore, DARPA has constructed a portfolio of projects to aid the process.

Time will be the true measure of the vehicle designed, but the idea that a college student, retired veteran, and many others will be allowed and incentivized to contribute to the design of a military vehicle is, I think, astounding!

]]> http://ge.geglobalresearch.com/blog/collaborative-design-for-military-vehicles/feed/ 0 http://ge.geglobalresearch.com/blog/collaborative-design-for-military-vehicles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collaborative-design-for-military-vehicles http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gegr/~3/QquNKdgBLtw/ http://ge.geglobalresearch.com/blog/stump-the-scientist-how-does-matter-hold-itself-together/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:46:05 +0000 Stump the Scientist http://ge.geglobalresearch.com/?p=36124 As always, thanks so much for submitting your Stump the Scientist questions! We appreciate everyone playing along with us. Read on to find out the answer to this week’s question!

Question from Facebook fan Zane Shirley-Howell:

How does matter hold itself together? Opposite charges of every atom should push apart.

Response from Chief Scientist Jim Bray:

Atoms are composed of a positively charged center, called the nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of negatively charge electrons. The first thing we should know is that opposite electrical charges attract each other, not repel; it is the same kind of charges that repel. So it is no surprise that the negatively charged electrons are attracted to the nucleus, which is oppositely charged, and the atom holds together.

When we look a little closer, there is a bit of a mystery: the nucleus gets its positive charge from several protons (in all cases but one), all with the electrical charge +1. The nucleus is very compact and occupies a very small amount of space in the atom’s center, and yet it does not come apart from the electrical repulsion of all the positively charged protons within it. The reason is that there is another force in nature within the nucleus called the “strong force”, and it acts at the small distances between all the particles in the nucleus to provide an attraction among them. The strong force is stronger than the electrical repulsion and so holds the nucleus together. So the atoms are stable.

At a larger scale, matter is made of atoms which are joined together chemically. Since the atoms are electrically neutral (having as many positive as negative charges), electrical repulsion is not a significant factor at these higher levels of aggregation.

As I’ve mentioned before, materials are at the core of almost every product and technology, making the materials characterization organization one of the most diverse groups within Global Research.  At the end of 2011, our “fun team” (yes, we do have fun at work) put together a really special project.  We prepared a 2012 calendar full of some of the most “beautiful” images that our group generated in 2011.  Calendars were provided to many of our colleagues, many of which fabricated the samples we analyzed; we also distributed them outside of our cafeteria, with the request for a donation to help support Habitat for Humanity and the Northeast Regional Food Bank.

For the next series of posts, I will be sharing the images from the calendar as well as some information about the materials in the images, the instrument which generated the images, and the team member that generated the image.  I hope you enjoy the photos, at the end of the series we will have a vote to see which is your favorite and we will select one of the voters and mail you one of our 2012 Materials Characterization calendars!

Our first image was generated by Ian Spinelli.  Ian tells us that his image (below) shows “a scanning electron micrograph of strengthening precipitates in a nickel-base superalloy.  Prior to imaging, a chemical etchant was used to remove the surrounding matrix.  The remaining particles are extremely small (the tiny spheres are only tens of nanometers in diameter).  They are formed by a process known as precipitation hardening, where the metal undergoes a heat-treatment in order to precipitate the particles from a supersaturated solid solution.  As a result, the chemistry and crystallography of the particles differ from the surrounding matrix, which makes them effective at impeding dislocation motion – the method by which metals deform under an applied load.  In summary, these precipitates give nickel-base superalloys the properties desirable for parts that are subjected to high temperatures and stresses, such as those found in gas turbines and jet engines.”

But you tell us… what do you see?

ORegen is an ecomagination-certified product that traps waste heat generated by industrial machines and turns it into electricity.   Last year, GE partnered with NRGreen Power to bring this system to the Alliance Pipeline.  This collaboration generates 14 MW of cleaner electricity (enough to power 14,000 homes!), saves almost 3 million gallons of water annually, and is expected to eliminate 38,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.  All of which leads to $9 million/year revenue generation for our customer!

This is a project that has been worked upon and developed in part, right here at Global Research Munich.  Thomas Frey has blogged about the hidden source of energy that is waste heat recovery and my colleagues Matt Lehar and Christian Vogel continue to improve the ORegen technology today.  Learn more by visiting GE Reports.

In the early 1970’s I was a twelve year old boy who liked to play the game “Strat-O-Matic Baseball.” This game had cards for dozens of the best baseball players of all time. The cards were used to play a game that consisted of two parts. In the first part the historical players were drafted by the people playing the game. The second part consisted of using the drafted player’s cards to simulate a baseball game. Dice would be rolled for each batter and a table on each card would be used to determine what the result was for each at-bat. I wanted to know which players were the best ones to draft, so I used a simple formula to calculate how good each player was. The formula gave one point for a walk or single, two for a double, three for a triple, and four for a home run. This value was multiplied by the chance for that cell in the table being selected. Then all of those values were summed up to give the player a score. I did this for every card. It turned out that a player I was not too familiar with, Honus Wagner, had the highest score and a few others players my friends and I did not know well also had high scores.

I started picking these players in the draft phase and I started winning most of the games. This is not how I became a stats geek, this is just one of the things I did because I am a stats geek. So, in the 70’s, I acted similar to Bill James, the person who took the initiative to analyze statistics that no one else cared about and was able to generate knowledge and understanding about the subject of the data.

In 1985, I graduated college with a degree in computer science and started working on a software training program at GE Global Research. The training program had about a dozen people a year for three years, so there were about 36 of us in the program. The older people, who were on their later years of the program, had a softball team in the corporate league. A bunch of us in the new class wanted to play, but they only let one or two join the team. The rest of us were not good enough. So, the rest of us formed our own team.

We played the older team twice that season. The first time we played them they beat us pretty good. So, the second time we were to play they were boasting about how they were going to beat us again and even told us they were having a competition to see who on their team can hit the most home runs in their second win. We decided to put in a new rule for our team for this game called the “one strike rule.” This rule said that no one could swing at a ball until they had one strike. Most people played softball to hit home runs, and no one celebrated walks. But, the pitchers in this league had played all season knowing that people would swing at any pitches, so they would almost never threw strikes. We walked and got deep into counts which forced the pitcher to try and throw strikes, just like the Oakland A’s did in 2002. And we beat the team that said none of us were good enough to play on their team. Then a few years later our team, with a few recruiting additions, won the league championship, partially because of the plate discipline we obtained from situational use of rules like the “one strike rule.”

One of the roles I had on the team was “stats man.” I would keep the book on the game (recording every at bat). Then, the day after the game, I would send out an e-mail with the on-base-percentage, average, and slugging for everyone in that game along with season totals. So, in the 80’s, we acted similar to Billy Beane, the baseball general manager who used statistics and analytics to help his team win.

In the 1990’s, I started teaching a class on applied intelligent reasoning systems for the computer science department of RPI as an adjunct professor in addition to working at GE. I wanted to create an in-class exercise that would be interesting for the students. At this same time it was baseball season and a young Derek Jeter was up for a new contract next season. I thought it would be fun to have the class determine how much the Yankees should pay Jeter. I was able to obtain data on players batting statistics and salaries from the espn.com website. Using this we selected the best stats for comparing players. The two stats we determined were the best were on-base-percentage and slugging.

Interestingly, the next year ESPN added a new stat to their lists. The stat they added is OPS, short for on-base-percentage plus slugging. OPS is now a single stat many people use to compare players. The class appraised Derek Jeter’s salary by calculating his OPS, finding three other players with similar OPS who have recently signed contracts (with some preference for players at the same position, same age, and from cities with the same market size), and using these three salaries to calculate what Jeter should be paid. The three similar players had their salaries adapted higher if they had a lower OPS or lower if they had a higher OPS. There were a few other adaptations made. Finally, the average of the three adapted salaries was calculated at $5M. That year the Yankees decided to pay Jeter $5M– the same as our analysis.

I am still using this exercise as part of teaching the Edison A class on computer algorithms. One of our projects at GE Global Research used this same appraisal technique to automate the appraisal of residential property. The papers and patents on the automated residential property system have been sited over a hundred times. So, in the 90’s we went beyond what was done in the book Moneyball and created intelligent systems based on the analytics!

To us, Pi is much more than a number.

For wind turbines, it can help us analyze wind blade speeds at their tips as we look for ways to improve wind capture and design the other rotating wind turbine parts. 

For MRI scanners, PI helps us design to achieve the best medical images.

Pi is also important for 3-D modeling and printing, which is an area where GE researchers are intensifying their efforts. 3-D printing, an area of additive manufacturing, is providing new manufacturing freedom that was not possible with conventional machining processes. Being able to take precise measurements is vital to this emerging manufacturing technique.

Happy Pi Day!

Question from Facebook Fan Conor Crossey:

If space is expanding where did it start? Also what was there before the big bang?

Response from Chief Scientist Jim Bray:

The first question is: “If space is expanding where did it start?”. Indeed, all our astronomical observations tell us not only that space (the universe) is expanding, but that it appears to be expanding faster all the time. This was a relatively recent surprise to scientists and led to the proposal of “dark energy” to explain the increasing expansion rate. The answer to this question is probably best said: “nowhere in particular”. The concept of “where” assumes that there is a space, objects, or coordinate system, around us to which we can reference positions. This is easy to do in our universe because we can reference everything to the earth or to other objects such as stars. Now imagine that only you exist in a black void with nothing else around. How would you tell anyone your position? You could not, because there is nothing to which you could reference yourself. This is the problem with asking where space (the universe) started; there was nothing else around to provide the reference for “where”.

The second question is: “what was there before the big bang?”. The best answer is probably “no one knows” (you have stumped all scientists). Books have been written about this, but they are all speculation or opinion at this time. Some theories have proposed that our universe arose from events within a larger universe or from the rebound of the collapse of an earlier universe. Some people question the validity of the word “before” in the question, if time began with the big bang. We should also recognize that we can answer such questions only within the bounds of science, which is to say that the answer should have some observable, verifiable, testable consequences within our present universe and reality. If we propose answers which have no consequences or verifiability within our universe, then such answers belong to the realm of philosophy or religion, not science.

As many of you may know ice could be a huge problem in everyday life.  For many of us who live in the North East of the US, dealing with ice and snow during our commute to work in the winter months is part of everyday life.  But actually ice can have major impact in many other important areas that might not be so obvious.  For examples, ice accretion on surfaces of aircrafts, wind turbine blades, oil and gas rigs and heat exchangers, to name a few examples, causes problems with respect to efficiency and cost of operation. Significant ice accretion on surfaces of an aircraft can cause problems during lift off and change the aerodynamics of the wings during flight; ice built up on wind turbine blades in cold climates can reduce the efficiency of power generation. I also need to mention that these are not new problems and there has been significant research and progress to combat ice in the past six decades.  A solution that is particularly attractive is an icephobic (or ice-resistance) coating. Other solutions are typically based on heating/ melting or mechanically breaking the ice, which end up being expensive since they require a lot of energy for their operation and also add weight which is not a desirable feature.  So this was a challenge that our team at the Global Research decided to work in 2005.

Much of our earlier efforts has been towards development of the so-called “low ice adhesion coatings”. Ice sticks to these coatings, but the nice thing is that you only need a very small force to remove the ice (the ice block’s weight or the drag forces provided by the wind are sometime sufficient). Our team has been very successful in making very low ice adhesion coatings. These days we are taking on two major challenges:  1-improve the robustness of the coatings for real life applications (the coatings have to survive harsh conditions and be resistant to sand and rain erosions);  2- create coatings that are not only low-ice-adhesion but also “ice resistant” that means they delay ice formation!  We have recently developed model nanostructured surfaces with periodic arrays of posts that delay the onset of ice formation by more than a minute.  We have also studied the fundamental physics behind this observation, which is very important for developing more realistic coatings that can one day be used in real-life applications.  We have learned that on these model water repellent surfaces, decreasing the water-substrate contact area plays a dual role in delaying ice formation: first by reducing heat-transfer and second by reducing the probability of ice nucleation at the water-substrate interface.

I recently attended the American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston and gave a talk about our findings.  I was very excited to talk about our work with other researchers from academia and industry.  This exchange of information is always very helpful and inspiring.  If you are interested in learning more about the work and ice nucleation delay, please read our recent paper in Langmuir (2012), volume 28, pages 3180−3186.

GE Global Research in Niskayuna held the first Electrification Week event in late 2011. The event brought researchers at Global Research, and engineers and business leaders together under one roof for five days. The discussion topics included GE technologies related to semiconductor devices and packaging, electrical machines, electrical insulation, and monitoring and diagnostics, which are key enablers to drive growth across many GE businesses – from Renewables, Oil & Gas, Energy Conversion, Energy Services to Aviation Systems, Transportation and Healthcare.

The event also invited new colleagues from acquisitions such as Lineage, Dresser, Woods Group, and Converteam. We exchanged ideas and communicated the latest exciting technologies and products from Global Research and GE businesses, we also shared best practices and synergies across GE.

The first day was focused on educating our customers with invited external speakers. GE internal presentations dedicated to power electronics, devices, machines, insulation and monitoring & diagnostics were arranged in parallel tracks with specially combined sessions focusing on technology interfaces. Poster sessions, lab tours and tutorials were also held in the week.

In future blogs, I will write about some of recent research and development activities, starting with summarizing contribution in Electrification Week, related to dielectrics and electrical insulation performed both at Global Research and around the world.