The Right Stuff: New “Flexible” Power Plant from GE Has Supersonic Pedigree

When GE engineers decided to build a better power plant a few years ago, they looked up at the sky. In the 1950s, aviation legend Gerhard Neumann built the first GE supersonic jet engine by using a system of compressor blades called “variable vanes” that could turn and alter the flow of air coming inside the engine during flight. “It changed everything,” says former GE aviation engineer Jim Johnson.

Today, nearly every jet engine uses Neumann’s technology and so does GE’s new “flexible” power plant. It dramatically cuts emissions and saves utilities fuel and money by allowing them to quickly change output and generate electricity only when customers need it. “Typically, efficiency drops off quickly and emissions go up as you reduce output,” says Eric Gerbhardt, vice president for thermal engineering at GE Power & Water. “Now we can come down to as low as 14 percent of maximum output and still remain emissions compliant. That’s something customers have been asking for.”

Jet Son: GE's new "flexible" power plant is using some of the same GE technology that allowed Chuck Yeager to fly at twice the speed of sound.

Here’s why. An electricity socket is like a shower head in your bathroom. When you take a shower in the morning, you expect the same strong water pressure. When utilities tap renewable electricity from wind farms and solar plants, they can keep the same power “pressure” flowing to your home and cut the amount of power they generate by burning gas and other fuels. The problem is that ordinary power stations are rigid and can’t respond to power gyrations caused by renewables dependent on the wind and the sun. The new GE plant, called FlexEfficiency 60, however, can ramp up power as fast as 100 megawatts per minute, twice as fast as the industry standard.

Advanced combustion technology, also developed for jet engines, keeps emissions like nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide in check. The technology is using blades made from single-crystals of nickel-based superalloys to manage extremely high temperatures and reduce emissions in the combustion chamber. “The whole blade is grown from a single metal kernel,” Gerbhardt says. Other blades are hollow and peppered with tiny holes, like miniature strainers. The ducts and holes channel cooler air to keep the temperature around the blades just right and prevent the blades from melting. “It’s a very precise science how every hole is positioned,” Gerbhardt says. “We shine infrared light on the blades on our test stand in Greenville and pick out the hot and cool spots,” he says. “We feed that data back to our design team.”

All this innovation and research means that new plant can stay as efficient as 61 percent even at low electricity output. According to the New York Times, the U.S. Department of Energy had compared such efficiency to running a four minute mile. Gerbhardt said that before the GE “flexible” plant came along, utilities would idle their plants overnight when demand drops and restart them in the morning. This is inefficient. “Now they can run it at a very low load for several hours and turn it back on when power is needed.”

Smart Water: From Uganda to Pakistan, Two GE Volunteers Clean Water with Table Salt and Ingenuity

One day last November, GE engineer Steve Froelicher got a phone call from Sister Mary Ethel Parrott. Sister Mary Ethel is a nun, a teacher and a physicist who helped set up a boarding school for girls in rural Uganda. She needed clean water for her Ugandan pupils and Froelicher, a “senior product architect” who designs washing machines and water heaters at GE Appliances in Louisville, had just the thing for her.

For a whole year, Froelicher, his colleague Sam DuPlessis, and two GE retirees had volunteered every Wednesday night inside Froelicher’s Louisville garage, building an inexpensive water purification device the size of a tea kettle for WaterStep, a local charity. The device uses a car battery, a couple of electrodes, table salt, and some basic chemistry to make chlorine from brine and kill pathogens in polluted water. “The gas mixes with contaminated water much like carbon dioxide mixes with soda pop,” Froelicher says. “In Uganda, they can get their hands on salt, but they can’t get their hands on much more. With salt, a car battery and some solar panels you could be making clean water for years.”

Worth His Salt: Steve Froelicher, second from the right, and volunteers from GE and WaterStep built 100 chlorinators at Louisville's IdeaFestival held last week.

WaterStep, which is working to provide clean water to people in Haiti, India, Pakistan and 23 other developing countries around the world, estimates that a child dies every 20 second due to a waterborne illness and that 1.2 billion people, one sixth of the planet’s total, lack daily access to safe drinking water.

Froelicher and DuPlessis first heard from WaterStep in November 2010. A cholera epidemic had just hit Haiti. The non-profit was looking for a rugged, portable device made from ordinary materials that could treat 1,000 gallons of water in less than an hour. They started by asking a lot of questions. “We had to learn many details that were not part of our jobs,” Froelicher explains. “I’m not a chemical engineer and neither is Sam. Like any typical new product development, we had to go back to school to understand what we were trying to do to make an excellent device.”

Within weeks, they were making prototypes inside Froelicher’s garage, a basic handyman’s workshop with a vice, a drill, a saw and a handful of other woodworking tools. This turned out to be a blessing. “By limiting ourselves, we developed a simple design and assembly techniques,” DuPlessis says. The team went through a “battery of testing,” Froelicher says. When one prototype was too small and another too large, they made a third that was taller. They manufactured six protypes before they settled on a design.

The device fits inside a 10-inch PVC cylinder with two plastic tubes attached at the top. It strips chlorine from salt water by applying battery voltage across a circular membrane, a process called electrolysis. The chlorine bubbles off one of the electrodes and floats to the top where the device captures it and mixes it with contaminated water. The chlorine begins to oxidize organic matter and kills the pathogens in the water. The water is usually safe to drink two hours after chlorination.

In November 2011, a group of Louisville doctors serving in a flooded area in Pakistan asked WaterStep for 50 chlorinators. The GE volunteers moved production from Froelicher’s garage to the non-profit’s small workshop. “We did a five-week crash course in building these things,” DuPlessis says. But the Pakistan team got their order. Each device traveled as a kit of some 100 parts inside a rugged tote. “The kit has tubing and clamps, spare parts and all kinds of stuff they need to build a mini-water treatment system,” Froelicher says. “You can check it like luggage.”

After the first order, more GE volunteers signed on. The sourcing team jumped in, talked to suppliers who either discounted or donated materials for the cause, and slashed material costs by 50 percent. A lean manufacturing team set up a production line that could scale from making 10 chlorinators per day to producing hundreds if required.

Froelicher and DuPlessis are now working to reduce the required battery power from 120 watts to 25 watts. Sister Mary Ethel's school in Uganda can already recharge its chlorinator battery from a solar panel. Says Froelicher: “If we can pull that off, we can run the device on a very small solar panel practically anywhere in the world.”

Blood Diamonds of Ore: GE Takes On Conflict Minerals

The Democratic Republic of Congo is Africa’s second largest country, but also the continent’s most violent. Over the last two decades, foreign and domestic armies, militias and gangs of armed thugs have been waging war and staging rebellions that have killed at least 5.5 million people and displaced many more. The fighters sustain their troops with money from the DRC’s rich mineral deposits. Observers estimate that armed groups control half of the tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold mines in the vast eastern part of the country and generate as much as $225 million annually from the mineral quarries. “They may own the mines in the conflict region, or tax the mines or tax the trade routes used to export the minerals,” says Sandy Merber, counsel for international trade regulation and sourcing at GE.

Wolframite Mining in the DRC's Kailo Province: Wolframite rocks are the source of tungsten, a rare hard metal used in light bulb filaments, machine tools, and catalysts in coal-fired power plants.

Because manufacturers around the world use these minerals in everything from digital cameras and cell phones to paint and golf clubs, NGOs seeking to cut off the funding have pushed companies to audit their supply chains to reduce the risk that the minerals they are using may support the conflict. In August, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced a new reporting rule that requires listed companies to “publicly disclose their use of conflict minerals that originated in the DRC or an adjoining country.” GE, through its citizenship initiatives, has been working with companies, NGOs, investors as well as government agencies to foster a system that supports cutting out conflict minerals from the supply chain and improves reporting.

One way is to create a network of certified conflict-free smelters. “There are thousands and thousands of suppliers and many layers of the supply chain, but the choke point in the system is the smelters,” Merber says. There are only about 200 significant smelters around the world. GE works with groups like the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition and Global e-Sustainability Initiative that have created a program to verify the sources and origins of the minerals at the smelters. “As this smelter verification program matures, companies can pass down through their supply chains a requirement that minerals be sourced from conflict-free smelters,” Merber says.

The GE Foundation, along with HP and Intel, is now participating in the Conflict-Free Smelter Early Adopters Fund, which provides grants to small smelters to help offset the costs of being audited. The Foundation also supports some of the leading NGOs monitoring the minerals trade.

GE is also one of 30 companies participating in a pilot program to implement guidelines on conflict minerals due diligence developed by the OECD. (You can find more details on GE’s new citizenship website.)

The GE Foundation is also an initial contributor to the Public Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade. Merber says that the Alliance will support efforts “to map supply routes from mines in the conflict region and elsewhere in the Congo to prove that you can actually source from the Congo and still get verified.” According to estimates, some 3 million people are working in this industry in the Congo. “You want to have a conflict-free policy but not a Congo-free policy,” Merber says. “If you shut down their place of business, that’s another humanitarian crisis.”

Cleared For Take-Off: Air Traffic Control Flies into the Cloud

Imagine it’s a summer Friday at Hartsfield-Jackson International, the world’s busiest airport. A thunderstorm this morning has broken dozens of connections in and out of Atlanta. Departing planes crawl in a long line along the tarmac. A few thousand feet up, some pilots are free to land while others groan as they turn into their fourth lap. Everybody wants faster updates from the control tower.

Cloudy With a Chance of Data: Storing air traffic management data in the cloud is part of GE’s push to build the Industrial Internet.

Air traffic delays don’t just spoil meeting plans or dinner at home. A second layer of frustration comes from not knowing what is happening. Even the pilots use the intercoms to vent: “Folks, I am still waiting to hear what gate we have been assigned.” Or, “We are 22nd in line to take off, and I am not sure what the hold-up is.”

But what if technology could solve the information problem and tame the delays? That solution is cloud computing, the same massive computer data farms that already hold your Gmail email, Picasa pictures, or Spotify music. “The cloud will get passengers from A to B quicker,” says Mike Durling, manager of GE’s supervisory controls and systems integration lab, at GE Global Research. “It allows speedy decisions about the plane’s position and path, allowing more seamless trips.”

Right now, air-traffic control uses technology that is hosted locally. A plane relies on the information it gets from the local tower. Air-traffic information has not yet been networked. But in the future, pilots will be able to fly into a figurative cloud of information that receives feeds from all over the world.

Soon air traffic controllers, whether in Atlanta or Zurich, will share real-time data through the cloud (really huge, earth-bound warehouses filled with thousands of data servers). Pilots will use that information to determine routes and altitude and prepare for any delays that may be brewing. Instead of radioing the tower, a pilot can pull down gate assignments herself, shaving minutes from the flight.

Durling’s lab won a contract this year to add cloud computing capabilities to ‘NextGen’ Air Traffic Management technology, the name given to a new National Airspace System due to be rolled out in the U.S. by 2025. NextGen will haul the country’s air traffic control from an aging ground-based system to a satellite-based system.

One benefit of such an upgrade is that journey times will shorten. So this new technology means less fuel-guzzling and lower emissions. Looked at a different way, shorter trips mean lower ticket prices.

Cloud computing is already a popular way to store music or word processing. But it’s been slow to progress to the aviation sector. The concept’s the same. Various users can tap into a remote location where there are no limits on data storage, performance and agility. GE teams feed the cloud with reams of data about wind speed, altitude and journey times, which are the building blocks of larger models that manage air traffic.

“The cloud fills in the gaps between the different independent platforms, such as those in the cockpit and on the ground,” says Durling. It reduces the impact of unknown factors—such as poor weather, off-schedule airplanes or the lack of empty gates—that add time to the journey.

So if you’re reading this at 10,000 feet while waiting for a landing slot—help’s on the way.

Can You Hear Me Now? Telecom Orders For Next-Gen Durathon Battery Top $63 Million Since July Launch

Every day, Kenya’s capital Nairobi goes four hours without power. That’s the price of a growing economy bumping against creaky infrastructure struggling to keep up. The blackouts are big problem for people like Bernard Njoroge, whose company Adrian Group keeps cellphone towers running for Kenya’s largest telecom, Safaricom. Njoroge used to rely on noisy power generators belching diesel fumes into Kenya’s hot air, and lead-acid batteries that could barely bridge the outage gap.

Not anymore. Njoroge just purchased 200 next-generation Durathon batteries made by GE. The batteries can last for as long as nine hours, a plenty of time to cover a power outage and recharge from the grid. “For a long time, I’ve been looking for an innovation like Durathon,” Njoroge says. “I have no need to run the generators, no more trouble with noise. With the batteries we can provide 99 percent availability of the network.”

Telecom operators in Africa and elsewhere will soon start powering cell phone towers with GE’s next-generation Durathon batteries. The low-maintenance batteries last twice as long as ordinary lead-acid batteries and can work for 20 years. They are also non-toxic and fully recyclable.

GE introduced Durathon, the flagship product of a new business unit called GE Energy Storage, only two months ago. Njoroge’s Adrian Group is one of 10 new customers from Africa, Asia, and the U.S. who just placed orders for batteries valued at $63 million. That’s on top of an order placed earlier in the summer by South Africa’s Megatron Federal.

Durathon is using innovative sodium chemistry to generate charge. The batteries, which contain more than 30 patents, can recharge 3,500 times, ten times more often than ordinary batteries, and last for two decades. They work in temperatures from minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit to 140-degree heat. They are non-toxic, fully recyclable, and take half the amount of space as lead-acid batteries.

GE is spending $170 million on a brand new Durathon plant the size of four football fields in Schenectady, New York. At full capacity, the plant will employ 450 workers. GE engineer Glen Merfeld was one of the lead engineers involved in developing Durathon. “We had to bring together expertise in materials science, ceramics, metallurgy, and manufacturing technology,” Merfeld says. “But there was almost nothing we couldn’t work through. I think that’s part of the story, why it’s so exciting that we have this incredibly cool new factory.”

Njoroge’s Adrian Group supports telecoms in five East African countries, including Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. “They’ve caught the word of what we are doing,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot of traffic, people coming to see the application in Nairobi. This product will be a fast seller in the region.”

Rocket Science: New “Ceramic” Jet Engine Has Space Shuttle Pedigree

Soon after the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on descent from orbit in February 2003, material scientists and engineers at GE’s plant in Newark, Delaware, started building a set of repair kits long thought impossible. Columbia suffered a crack in its left wing by a briefcase-sized insulating foam fragment that fell from a fuel tank during take-off. During her return, superheated air entered the spacecraft through the wound and ripped the shuttle apart 15 minutes before touchdown. The GE team, in collaboration with NASA and industry partners, helped design and fabricate unique patches to plug up in space similar damage on the shuttle’s wings and belly, and prevent disasters in the future.

Return to Flight: The Space Shuttle Discovery returned to flight in July 2005. It was the first shuttle to fly after the Columbia disaster. It carried two wing and body repair kits made from a revolutionary ceramic composite material developed by GE scientists.

The team designed the patches from a special ceramic composite material that could survive wild temperature swings, from minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit in orbit to a 3,000-degree inferno caused by the drag of Earth’s atmosphere during the shuttle’s 17,000 miles-per-hour descent. “You could bolt it on the wing leading edge in space and cover the damaged portion,” says Robert Klacka, technology marketing manager at GE Ceramic Composite Products. “The repair kit had 30 different patches that could cover a hole located on over 80 percent of the wing leading edge surface. The thin, flexible panels used a high temperature toggle bolt to attach it through the hole on the wing. Thankfully, we never had to use them.”

That’s not entirely true. The shuttle fleet retired last year, but the materials live on vicariously inside GE’s innovative LEAP engines, as steering components for ballistic missile defense systems, and as rocket motor thrusters for a new commercial space transportation aircraft. “The [Space Shuttle] kits were basically using the same family of materials,” Klacka says.

Ceramic materials can take a lot of heat but are notoriously fragile. Just think of the coffee mug. Scientists at GE Aviation, GE Global Research and at Klacka’s Delaware plant have spent the last two decades developing ceramic composites that are tough and one-third the weight of the best nickel super-alloys. They can work beyond the alloys’ melting temperatures, a property that allows jet engines like the LEAP to become more efficient.

GE makes two types of ceramic composites. Ceramics strengthened with carbon fibers withstand over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and serve as hot gas valves and thrusters inside of rocket systems, or heat shields for hypersonic aircraft and re-entry vehicles in the aerospace industry. The second group, which is reinforced with ceramic fibers and operates at 2,400 degrees, is more durable, and has applications as turbine tip shrouds, combustor liners, blades, and fairings in turbine and jet engines like the LEAP.

GE workers in Delaware make the composite parts from specially engineered fiber tapes that are formed into turbine engine components, infiltrated with silicon and converted to ceramic. “I’ve seen a lot of different materials,” says Klacka, who has been in the composites business for over 25 years. “Our materials have the strength, durability and manufacturability that other ceramic composites lack. That’s why they work.”

Appetite for Destruction: Giant Fridge Shredder Hits 100,000 Milestone

Brian Conners likes to break things down. “I am a manufacturing engineer,” he says. “But I like taking things apart, rather than building them.” He’s got the perfect job. Conners is president and chief operating officer of ARCA Advanced Processing, which runs a hulking 40-foot shredder that can chomp down one two-door refrigerator-freezer to chip-sized bits every 50 seconds, or 600 of them per day. “Think of it as a giant paper shredder,” he says.

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CuttingEdge.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Showing Its Teeth: Think of the 40-foot recycling behemoth as a giant paper shredder. Knives like these can cut up a refrigerator to chip-sized bits in 50 seconds.[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT1.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Conners’ shredder is the only such machine in the U.S. manufactured by UNTHA Recycling Technologies (URT).[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT2.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system can process approximately one refrigerator per 50 seconds. [/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT4.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system can transform refrigerator insulating foam into pellets for use as fuel or other products.[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT5A.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system recovers approximately 95 percent of the insulating foam in refrigerators in a sealed system, reducing greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance emissions. [/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT6.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]“Industry Way” – one refrigerator’s shredded insulating foam which is typically landfilled (three large blue barrels). “The RAD Way” – one refrigerator’s degassed and pelletized insulating foam, which can be used as fuel or other products (lower, far right bucket).[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT8.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system recovers high-quality plastics, aluminum, copper, steel and even pelletized foam. They can be used to make new products. Shown here: steel. [/image]

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Speed is only one of the machine’s virtues. Americans junk about nine million refrigerators and freezers every year. Most are recycled for metals at auto shredders along with cars. As a result, the plastics and the insulating foam, suffused with blowing agents like the ozone-depleting Freon and potent greenhouse gases, end up in landfills and in the atmosphere. The shredder can recover approximately 95 percent of the insulating foam and the harmful gasses in it. “The environmental benefit of treating the foam is tremendous,” he says.

GE partnered with Conners' joint-venture partner, Appliance Recycling Centers of America, in 2009. GE ships to Conners old refrigerators from customers who buy a new one from The Home Depot and other retailers connected to GE’s vast appliance distribution network. Since last summer, the shredder recycled 100,000 refrigerators and fridges, diverting 5.5 million pounds of foam and plastics from landfills for reuse. Pellets of the “degassed” foam, for example, can be used as fuel in cement manufacturing. “GE is the first and only appliance manufacturer to implement the EPA’s Responsible Appliance Disposal Program,” says Mark Vachon, GE’s vice president for ecomagination. “We are reducing emissions of ozone depleting substances, greenhouse gasses and the amount of waste entering our landfills, and protecting our air and water.”

Conners’ plant is in Philadelphia, but on a typical day trucks haul in old fridges from a dozen eastern states between Vermont and North Carolina. “They don’t come in at the same rate every day,” Conners says. “In the summer and during the holiday season we get more. But we take all brands.” Workers at the recycling plant first remove cords, shelves, the refrigerant and oil from the compressor.

A conveyor belt takes the empty fridge shell inside a sealed vacuum chamber, where large knives made from hardened steel cut it to bits one and half inches long. The machine then mechanically sorts out the different materials. Air suction hoods pull off the foam, magnets handle steel, and special “eddy current separators” handle aluminum and copper. The final recycling product, plastics, exits in large bags.

The recycling machine automatically pumps out the harmful gasses trapped in the shredding chamber and cools them down with liquid nitrogen to minus 90 degrees Celsius. At that freezing temperature, the gasses turn into liquids. The shredder bottles the liquefied gasses in tanks, and workers ship them for destruction to a special incinerator in Arkansas. “It’s the cutting edge of technology,” Conners says.

Pretty on the Inside: New BodyMaps App Lets Users Explore the Inside of the Body

Some of earliest and best anatomical drawings come from Leonardo da Vinci. The renaissance polymath would sit in on human and animal autopsies (he would sometimes cut the bodies himself) and record his observations in detailed drawings fringed with copious notes. He also made realistic body part models by injecting molten wax inside the cranium and the aortic valve and studied their shape and function. His work, however, progressed in fits and starts. Leonardo was hamstrung by the lack of cadavers (often the bodies of criminals) and a ban on human dissections issued by the Pope. His drawings remained out of sight for 400 years after his death in 1519, despite their revolutionary nature.

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/male.gif"]
Body Check: The BodyMaps app allows users see inside and learn about the body. Doctors can use it to explain medical procedures.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/female.gif"]
The app, which was specifically developed for the iPad’s Retina display, features anatomy models of both sexes.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/heart.gif"]
BodyMaps features 3D, high-resolution images of more than 1,000 body parts, tissues, bones and organs, all captured in a searchable index.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/foot.gif"]
BodyMaps features 3D, high-resolution images of more than 1,000 body parts, tissues, bones and organs, all captured in a searchable index.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/abdomen.gif"]
Doctors and nurses can draw directly on the images and highlight information for patients.
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There is no need to worry about Papal wrath or corpse supply in the digital era. Anybody, from medical students and professionals to enthusiasts and artists, can view the inside of the human body in sharp detail with a new app called BodyMaps and launched today by GE and Healthline Networks. The app, which was specifically developed for the iPad’s Retina display, features 3D, high-resolution images of more than 1,000 body parts, tissues, bones and organs, all captured in a searchable index. Just like Leonardo’s multi-view models, users can rotate more than 30 body parts for a better look. They can also toggle between the male and female body.

BodyMaps also contains 200 videos covering various medical conditions, procedures, and treatments, as well as a mark-up tool. Doctors and nurses can draw directly on the images and highlight information for patients. The app is social media ready and users can share their mark-ups and notes through email and Facebook.

“For patients, the [visual] resources were very scarce all through the medical world,” says Gloria Horns, a nurse educator and well-known patient advocate at University of California, San Francisco. “You were creating your own, reinventing the wheel every time, and working with diagrams, charts, and flat images.”

Horns has cared for many organ transplant patients during her long career. She says that the new app “is really going to be a terrific tool for the nurses that are teaching these patients through the whole course of the illness.”

Says Horns: “They are really going to get it. It’s hard to describe how this will help us. It’s pretty phenomenal.”