GE Reports

Getting Real: GE Begins Work on Multi-Million Rio Research Center

GEreporter — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:23:17 +0000

GE broke ground on a new R$500 million ($190 million) technology center in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, spreading its global R&D footprint and moving closer to large Latin American customers.

GE is spending $6 billion annually on new technologies and employs 3,000 scientists and engineers at four research centers in the United States, Germany, India and China. The Brazil facility will add another 400 researchers when it opens in 2013. “Today, innovation has to be in the markets you play in,” said Mark Little, GE chief technology officer, who traveled to Brazil for the ground breaking. “You have to be close to your customers and be close to the best talent, wherever it exists in the world.”

Mark Little, GE Chief Technology Officer, describes GE’s new technology center in Rio de Janeiro. The center will open in 2013.

Research teams at the Rio center will focus on developing biofuels for aircraft engines, natural gas-powered locomotives, “intelligent” systems for advanced automation, power grid diagnostics, sub-sea systems, optimization and logistics systems for ports and mines, and also healthcare technology. They will tackle the needs of GE’s local customers like Petrobas and EBX Group, but the results “can be later transitioned to other parts of the world,” Little said.

More than half of GE’s $147 billion in revenues in 2011 came from markets outside the U.S. In Latin America, revenues swelled by 29 percent last year and the company is forecasting a strong growth. Just yesterday, GE announced that it would take a $300 million equity stake in an infrastructure fund run by the Brazilian industrial conglomerate EBX, which has operations in Brazil, Colombia and Chile. EBX will invest $15.5 billion between 2011 and 2012 in infrastructure and natural resources development in the region.

This global growth translates to jobs back home, says GE Vice Chairman John Rice. “There are thousands of jobs in Greenville, South Carolina, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Evendale, Ohio, that only exist because of our ability to compete on a global basis,” Rice says.

The Gold Standard: Team USA to Use Digital Medical Records for the First Time at London 2012 Games

GEreporter — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:58:36 +0000

Team USA takes no chances getting ready for the London 2012 Olympics . Every little edge counts, on the field and off. Health is a good example. This morning, the U.S. Olympic Committee announced that it would use, for the first time, only electronic medical files in London this summer. “Gold, silver, what’s the difference? One centimeter after a kilometer of competition,” says Dr. Bill Moreau, the USOC managing director of sports medicine. “Our job is to help that athlete to find that last little piece that makes them the best in the world.”

Moreau has found GE’s Centricity* Practice Solution, an integrated electronic medical records (EMR) and practice management system that helps doctors and health administrators keep information about, say, pulled muscles, MRI scans, treatment regimens and prescribed medicines all in one database. The USOC will digitize records for the more than 700 athletes heading to London to compete, as well as an additional 3,000 maintained by USOC staff.

The USOC will be sticking with EMR after the games. American athletes compete at multiple global locations, one Sunday in Sydney and the next in Scandinavia. Centricity Practice Solution will let their physicians keep a close eye on them when they are training and competing abroad. “My extensive training and playing schedule takes me all over the world and the last thing I want to worry about is my medical records,” says Alex Morgan, forward on the U.S. Women’s Soccer National Team. Morgan says that EMR puts her mind at ease. “It allows me to not worry about injuries and focus on the task at hand – in this case, winning the gold for Team USA in London,” she says.

When Money Grows With Trees: Calculate Your Fuel Savings, CO2 Emissions With New Online App

GEreporter — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:55:24 +0000

A Brooklyn family decides to swap their 2006 Toyota Sequoia for a 2011 Prius. What’s their impact on the environment? According to IntelliGauge, a new online fuel consumption and carbon dioxide calculator, the result is a reduction in CO2 emissions equivalent to planting 101 trees every year. Since they drive a modest 5,000 miles per year, they will also save $1,000 in gasoline money.

Crunching Carbon: IntelliGauge compares vehicles and calculates annual CO2 emissions, fuel efficiency, and annual fuel costs.

The application, which is available for use on tablets, smartphones and desktops, was originally developed for vehicle fleet operators, but families and car owners can use it too. “Companies look for ways to reduce their CO2 footprint and swapping out old trucks for a more efficient model is the easiest way to do it,” Jadine Starmer, a web product manager at GE Capital who created the app. “The app allows you to see the costs and the savings.”

IntelliGauge, which launched last week, covers dozens of conventional cars and trucks, as well as hybrids and electric cars like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf. Starting in July, a second version of the app will also include vehicles powered by compressed natural gas (CNG). Owners select the select the desired car makes from pull-down menus, enter the number of miles driven per year and the number of vehicles in their fleet, and the app will calculate their annual fuel and CO2 savings. It does not compare the actual price of the car.

Every day the application pulls fresh mileage and fuel costs data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to deliver the most accurate results. CNG data will most likely come from GE. “There is not much information out there about CNG right now,” Starmer says. GE is a pioneer in the budding CNG field. Starting this fall, GE will start building a network of 250 CNG compression units along busy U.S. truck routes.

IntelliGauge also links to other EV products from GE like the WattStation charger and related online apps. GE spent the last two years building a suite of software called WattStation Connect that allows owners to manage chargers from their smartphones and monitor energy costs. Drivers also get directions to nearby chargers, see pricing data, and learn which unit is open.

Facebook for the Body: Your Organs May Soon Report Their Status Over New Generation of Wireless Medical Sensors

GEreporter — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:21:27 +0000

Mike Harsh, chief technology officer for GE Healthcare, tells the story of a doctor who had trouble placing a stethoscope to the chest of a cardiac patient and listen his heart because of a tangle of cables coming from monitoring devices attached to his torso. “You sort of understand what the problem is,” Harsh says. “People wear so many wires. It just tethers them right to their beds.”

But Harsh is trying to cut those wires the way of the telephone receiver cord. GE’s vision is to develop a new generation of wireless sensors that attach to the body like a Band Aid. They would draw power from a tiny integrated battery and use radio waves to communicate with a receiver either in the patient’s pocket or in his hospital room. Outside the hospital, the information aggregated locally from the sensors could be relayed into a cellular network and automatically provide doctors and hospitals with round-the-clock patient monitoring and an uninterrupted flow of data.

“It’s just like those hands-free Bluetooth head-sets, except we now transmit physiological signals rather than voice,” Harsh says. “That’s what makes this so interesting.”

Crunching Carbon: IntelliGauge compares vehicles and calculates annual CO2 emissions, fuel efficiency, and annual fuel costs.

This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates the use of U.S. radio spectrum, will rule on freeing up two radio bands for the devices. “You’ve heard people talk about the Internet of Things,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. “You’ve heard about machine-to-machine connected devices. Well, here’s an example of these concepts coming to life. This is a big deal and we’re just at the beginning.”

Scientists at GE Global Research and at GE Healthcare’s Life Care Solutions unit started developing wireless sensors for so-called Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) several years ago. Harsh says the two proposed MBAN frequency bands are “sitting right next to” radio spectra used by Bluetooth and ZigBee technology. “The available silicon chipsets today can be pulled just a little bit” to cover the MBAN bands, Harsh says. “That opens up the consumer electronics space and the manufacturers of all the silicon would help us enter the space to really drive the costs down.”

As costs fall and always-on wearable medical monitors spread from hospitals to patient’s homes, their impact could be colossal. “This will allow us to look at a large amount of data and start to do analytics, not just on ECG, but we can pull in respiration, or pulse oximetry,” says Harsh.

GE’s analytical software then can start sifting the diverse data from many patients and look for patterns. “You look for the signature of something that might happen based on the data that is coming in,” Harsh says. “That’s really what we’re talking about. When you look at cost, access, and quality, it hits all three right in the sweet spot.”

Disclaimer: This is a technology in development that represents ongoing research and development efforts. These technologies are not products and may never become products. They are not for sale, and have not been cleared or approved by the FDA for commercial availability.

The Fine Print: How Additive Manufacturing and Bespoke Products Are Changing the Way We Make Things

GEreporter — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:15:03 +0000

It’s been 100 years since Henry Ford’s assembly line disrupted the way companies made things. The current advent of additive manufacturing may prove to be equally momentous. “It’s one of the biggest things to happen in manufacturing in some time,” says Luana Iorio, material scientist at GE Global Research (GRC).

Additive manufacturing “prints” an object from a digital file by depositing one layer of material layer on top of another, rather than starting with, say, a piece of forged steel and cutting, sawing or milling it away. It allows companies to more easily manufacture complex shapes and structures such as fuel nozzles and blades that have been traditionally difficult to make. “You give the designers a completely new freedom,” says Iorio, who leads GRC’s additive manufacturing research. “They are not bound by the constraints of traditional manufacturing. They can really strip down products to the core of what it is they need them to do.”

Crunching Carbon: IntelliGauge compares vehicles and calculates annual CO2 emissions, fuel efficiency, and annual fuel costs.

This will benefit industries like aviation where weight reduction can translate into multi-million fuel savings. But the GRC team is developing “printing” applications for all GE businesses, from healthcare to energy. “The potential makes us excited about what we can do. We’re looking at applying additive manufacturing to polymers, ceramics, metals, all kinds of materials for many different components across the GE product line,” Iorio says.

Like ordinary printing, the process starts with a digital file that holds a 3-D image of the manufactured component. A team of GRC software engineers is developing design applications to harness the method’s full power. “We need to give the designers new tools so they can take advantage of the new manufacturing freedom,” Iorio says.

Another team of engineers spend the bulk of their time building the actual “printers.” “There are still many obstacles,” Iorio says. “The machines are evolving very quickly and some, like the MakerBot that you can assemble yourself, are pretty inexpensive. But if you want to make components from metals that we use for building aircraft engines, those machines cost a million or more.”

Manufacturing speed and product size are also a challenge. “How can we get more throughput from these machines, how can we make the parts bigger and the material properties more reliable,” Iorio says. Her team includes material scientists, mechanical, manufacturing and software engineers, chemists, physicists and experts across many GE businesses. “This is very much a multi-disciplinary effort and I think what gives us an edge in this space.”

Ford edged out his competition by harnessing the power and the speed of the assembly line, which allowed him to make one Model-T after another. But that’s not enough anymore. Customers demand products specific to their needs. “If you look at the megatrend of mass customization, additive manufacturing is the way that people will be able to get things tailor-made,” Iorio says. “In traditional manufacturing, you’ve got produce tooling that is often very expensive, and you need to produce tens of thousands of parts that are identical to recoup the cost. With additive manufacturing, there is none of that. It’s just as easy to print the next part customized and different from the previous part, as it is to produce the same thing over and over again.”

Cheese Lights the Whey: Biogas from Dairy Farm, Brewery and Landfill Turns Wisconsin Hospital into Renewables Powerhouse

GEreporter — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:36:26 +0000

The Crave Brothers dairy farm in Waterloo, Wisconsin, makes tubs of celebrated mascarpone cheese. Across the state, City Brewery in La Crosse brews millions of cases of winning ales and lagers. But Wisconsin’s Gundersen Lutheran Hospital gets excited about the stuff that doesn’t pass the smell test.

Gundersen takes biogas produced from cheese whey and brewing waste, as well as landfill methane, and turns it into megawatts of electricity in GE’s Jenbacher engines. The pioneering hospital has been investing in renewable electricity and conservation and has set a goal to become 100 percent energy independent by 2014.

Crunching Carbon: IntelliGauge compares vehicles and calculates annual CO2 emissions, fuel efficiency, and annual fuel costs.

This helps the environment – the landfill and the brewery used to flare off the gas – and it’s also good for business. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates American hospitals spend $5 billion, or at least 15 percent of their profits, on energy costs. Hospital pavilions are also more than 2.5 times more energy and CO2 intensive than office buildings. “Our goal is to show that we can be environmentally sound and improve our finances at the same time,” Jeff Thompson, Gundersen’s CEO told Fast Company recently.

The hospital’s Jenbachers, which are part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio, started generating renewable power and heat at the dairy farm and the brewery in 2009. Last week, Gundersen’s 350,000 square-foot clinic in Onalaska became possibly the nation’s first energy-independent medical campus. The clinic gets all the power it needs from yet another Jenbacher burning methane produced by the La Crosse County landfill. For GE, the Onalaska story gets even better. The landfill Jenbacher powers two GE digital mammography screening units that the clinic installed last year.

Electricity from biogas and wind now covers about 30 percent of Gundersen’s total power demand. The La Crosse landfill project alone will produce more than $7 million in revenue over the next decade, the hospital estimates. Those are real savings which Gundersen can pass to patients. “The landfill requires initial investment, but in six-and-a-haIf years it will be completely paid for, and we’ll have several hundred thousand dollars less each year in energy costs,” CEO Thompson told Fast Company. “If the cost of energy skyrockets, it won’t hurt our patients and our community.”

What the Doctor Ordered: GE’s HealthAhead Program Takes on Healthcare Costs

GEreporter — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:20:50 +0000

A new report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the U.S. spent $2.6 trillion on healthcare in 2010, or $8,402 per every American. How much is that? Nearly 18 percent of the country’s GDP. By comparison, in 1970 healthcare spending reached just 7 percent of GDP. These are not abstract numbers but real money missing from the wallet. Consider that health insurance premiums grew more than three times the rate of inflation between 2000 and 2010.

It’s time to do something about it. GE, for example, invests annually $50 million through its HealthAhead program in employee health and wellness costs, offering gym discounts, healthy meals, preventive screenings, and health classes. Our graphic tells the story.

Click to enlarge

GE Taps Mining Momentum with Two Proposed Acquisitions

GEreporter — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:55:59 +0000

GE said on Tuesday that it would acquire two underground mining equipment companies and boost the global growth of its mining business. GE will pay A$700 million in cash ($679 million), or A$1.27 per share, for 100 percent of Australia’s Industrea Limited. Industrea, which is publicly traded on the Australian Stock Exchange, is a diversified provider of mining products, services and mine safety technology like underground directional drilling and drill guidance and collision avoidance systems. Industrea’s customers include global commodities giants like BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Xstrata.

Crunching Carbon: IntelliGauge compares vehicles and calculates annual CO2 emissions, fuel efficiency, and annual fuel costs.

GE also signed a binding letter of intent to acquire Fairchild International, an independently owned and operated maker of underground mining equipment based in Glen Lyn, Virginia. The terms of the Fairchild transaction have not been disclosed. Fairchild manufactures continuous miners, coal haulage systems, mine maintenance vehicles, and battery-powered scoops.

The two acquisitions will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Lorenzo Simonelli, president and CEO of GE Transportation, said that both Industrea and Fairchild would benefit from GE’s experience in building battery-powered and clean propulsion systems, as well as from its global reach. “We see this as a way to bring the next generation mining equipment to customers around the globe,” Simonelli said.

The Industrea transaction must be still approved by shareholders and government regulators.

One Mill’s Waste, Another Mill’s Megawatts

GEreporter — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:43:10 +0000

A few years ago, the Wuhan Iron & Steel (Group) Company (WISCO), already China’s largest steel mill, was plotting new growth. The company needed to expand its power supply, but wanted to keep emissions in check. The mill’s managers looked at their options and found one they liked. They would make electricity from blast furnace gas [BFG], a waste gas made during the steel-making process.

Very few companies have the technology to pull this off and GE jumped at the chance. It quickly hit a snag. “Blast furnace gas is outside of the flammable range, it won’t burn in our combustors,” says Bob Jones, manager for GE’s synthetic gas products. Engineers at GE Energy scrambled for a solution. It was staring them in the face. WISCO makes its own coke and coke ovens produce gas rich in energetic hydrogen. They scrubbed the coke gas – it contains tar – mixed it with BFG, and pressurized it in rugged compressors using GE’s oil and gas technology.

What Waste?: GE technology generates enough electricity from WISCO’s blast furnace gas to make 20 million tons of steel and power 260,000 homes.

The mix clocked in at about 15 percent of the heating value of natural gas, enough to ignite inside GE’s fuel flexible synthetic gas combustors installed in the 9E Heavy Duty Gas Turbine. “They are the workhorses in the industrial segment,” Jones says. “We have hundreds of them out in the field.”

The first unit of the WISCO power plant opened in late 2009, and a second unit a year later. The plant is now working around the clock, generating 1 billion kilowatts hours of electricity, enough to make 20 million tons of steel and even kick electricity back to the City of Wuhan to power 260,000 homes. The technology also scrubs 2 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and saves WISCO $32 million in annual operational expenses.

Key parts of the Wuhan power plant have been designed by American engineers in Schenectady, New York, and Greenvile, South Carolina. GE talked about the WISCO story and the technology behind it at AISTech 2012, a large steel industry gathering held in Atlanta last week. It built a website that illustrates how the power plant works. Find out more about it here.

Mother of Invention: Sixty Years Ago, Pat Leary Helped Build GE’s First Supersonic Jet Engine

GEreporter — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:09:21 +0000

The week before Mother’s Day, Mark Leary called his mom, Patricia. Mark, who works on GE’s new GEnx engines, has been an engineer at GE Aviation for almost 30 years. Six decades ago, Patricia, who is 83 and the mother of six, helped develop GE’s first jet engines. She still keeps tabs on them. “I look at the pictures of the engines today and they don’t look like anything the engines then,” Patricia said. “I’m sure some of [your] engines are still flying across the country,” said her son.

Patricia joined GE as an engineering assistant in 1949. At the time, there were just 4,000 female engineers in the entire country, and no more than a handful at GE’s aviation unit, then based outside of Boston in Lynn, Massachusetts. “They were looking for people to hire for the Lynn plant,” Patricia said. She had a fresh degree in mathematics from Emmanuel College and started in a “calculating pool,” crunching engine test data with a slide rule and a couple of “really fancy” calculators. “I liked the idea that math was being used to produce something,” Patricia said.

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Her boss in Lynn was Gerhard Neumann, a jet propulsion legend and innovator. She borrowed books and took GE classes in aerodynamics and gas turbine theory. But she also kept math close and enrolled for an advanced degree at Boston University. “This was well before the string theory,” she laughed. “Complex variables and the Kutta-Joukowski theorem were about as high as we ever got.” The theorem just happens to be the corner stone of aerodynamics.

The new skills came handy quickly. Neumann just started working on GE’s first supersonic jet engine, the J79. The key part of the engine that permitted speeds as high as Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, was a compressor that modulated the amount of air coming inside the engine. “It’s ridiculous that I should remember this, but I was assigned to write a report on the annular shroud, a second ring placed around the middle of the compressor blades to eliminate turbulence,” Patricia said. “We now call it mid-span shroud,” Mark jumped in.

She also analyzed data from compressor tests. The tests did not always go smoothly. “At one point the research compressor was cantilevered from the back wall of a test cell,” she recalled. “We ran it beyond its strength, it came off the wall and chewed up the floor.”

In 1949, GE started moving the aviation unit to Evendale, Ohio. The plant grew from 1,200 to 12,000 employees in just a couple of years. When Patricia first arrived in the summer of 1952, everything was still in flux. “They ran a bus directly from the downtown hotels to the plant,” she said. “So many people were transferring.”

One of them was her husband, Art, a fellow young Bostonian who worked for GE in logistics. They married, and in 1955 Patricia left jet engines for motherhood. “We were a nuclear family, just my husband, myself and the baby, with no relatives nearby,” Patricia said.

Art spent 37 years with GE, and Mark’s older brother also worked for the company. The J79 went to serve on a number on fighter planes like the F-4 Phantom. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020.

Just before they hung up, Patricia asked Mark how long he’s been at GE. “Since 1983,” Mark answered.

“God bless you,” she said. “Time gets by.”