Like Salt in the Wound: Dealing with Sandy’s Salt Water Menace

Hurricane Sandy has cut power to six million homes across the northeast of the U.S. on Monday night, breaking trees and ripping power lines. But also insidious was the surging sea that knocked out electricity across New York City and in many seaside towns. Consolidated Edison had preventively shut down the grid in neighborhoods prone to flooding, but the utility still experienced “the largest storm related outage in our history.”

That’s in part because of Sandy's salty surge. “You can’t just pump the sea water out,” says John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development at GE Digital Energy. “Dry salt is an electrical conductor. When it covers insulators, the material that prevents the flow of electricity in transformers, switches, and other equipment, it can make electricity flash over and cause a short circuit. It’s also corrosive.” As a result, utility crews in Manhattan and elsewhere have to first pump out Sandy’s brackish tide, spray the equipment thoroughly with fresh water, and dry it with powerful fans, before they can turn the power back on. The same is true for the city’s submerged subway tunnels.

Water World: The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, connects Wall Street with Brooklyn. It remains filled with Sandy's surge.

Cleanup can be tedious work, especially when salt water seeps through air vents inside transformers and other machinery. “When the equipment is all washed and completely dry, only then you can energize it step by step, test the functions and make sure that it still works,” McDonald says. “The crews do it by experience.”

That's something that McDonald does not lack. He’s is one of GE’s experts on the so called smart grid. He says that during bad storms like Hurricane Sandy, the smart grid, which is a network of smart meters, sensors, and other “intelligent” devices and systems, can quickly detect and isolate the biggest problems so that they do not cascade and cause a blackout. “You restore service to customers on the healthy sections of the system and focus the repair crews on the part of the system that had the disturbance,” McDonald says.

McDonald says that smart meters are an effective tool for scoping out the size of a power outage. “If you have smart meters at homes, you know specifically which customers are without electricity,” he says. A utility can mash the smart meter data with information from a distribution management system, an outage management system, and the geographic information system that includes digitized network maps and facility data. These maps include the geographical coordinates of all the switches, poles, meters and other assets that the utility owns. “The integration of these systems shows you the present state of each asset, whether it’s energized or de-energized, under maintenance or out of service,” McDonald says. “As repair crews work, they know exactly what’s being done, they know exactly how many customers are being affected in each area and whether the problem is a pole that is down, or a transformer that is out of service because of water problems.”

McDonald says that the smart grid also helps utilities “figure out which customers should be restored first, it helps you to prioritize, and verify that customers have had their power restored.”

It also helps power companies and their customers stay in touch, which is key during chaotic storms like Sandy. “With a smart meter in their homes, and with the other intelligent devices and systems, you can let the customer know that we know that there is a problem, that we have a crew on the way or already on site, and that we expect to have power restored in a certain number of hours,” McDonald says. “That’s important.” It may not turn the power on right away, but it brings customers peace of mind.

Taking Off: How GE Invented the Modern Jet Engine

It was the 1960s and the U.S. Air Force came to GE with a big problem. It had ordered from Lockheed a huge new cargo jet, the largest plane in the world in fact, and needed a jet engine that could match it and haul 50,000 tons of tanks, transporters and equipment 5,000 miles anywhere in the world at a clip of 500 miles per hour. Over the next few years GE engineers huddled with machinists and mechanics and came up with a revolutionary engine design that boosted thrust to record 40,000 pounds but also cut fuel burn by a quarter. The cargo plane, called C-5 Galaxy, was so massive that GE had to test the engines on a B-52 bomber, the closest jet in size. The Air Force received the first C-5 in 1969. The planes have since ferried troops and cargo in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and will remain in service through 2040.

Larger than Life: Two airmen stand in the shade under the wing of a GE-powered C-5 Galaxy sitting on the runway at Baghdad International Airport.

But the Galaxy was only the beginning. Today, nearly all jet propelled passenger and cargo planes use the Galaxy's groundbreaking engine design called high-bypass turbofan. The design has allowed airlines to fly more people farther, faster and with less fuel.

GE saw the commercial potential of the technology first and quickly built a passenger version on the Galaxy engine. That engine, called CF6, first flew in 1971 and workers at GE Aviation’s Evendale plant in Ohio are still building several every day. Today, the CF6 is the most common jet engine in the world. GE has delivered more than 7,000 of them to 250 airlines in 87 countries. More than two thirds of the engines still remain is service, powering all makes of planes, from Boeing 747 jumbos like the President's Air Force One to Airbus long-haul jets and Beluga cargo lifters. The newest versions on the engine will still be flying in 2040, 70 years after it first one debuted.

GE is now applying the CF6 know-how to its latest and most advanced engines, GEnx and LEAP. GEnx, which started flying last year, is 15 percent more efficient than comparable engines in service today, produces 15 percent fewer CO2 emissions, and 30 percent less noise. New materials and design cut weight by hundreds of pounds and boosted thrust. Where the fan in the front of the CF6 engine needs 36 metal blades, GEnx employs half the number of blades manufactured from light-weight carbon fiber composites. As a result, GEnx-powered Boeing 787 Dreamliner recently set new distance and speed records on a round-the world flight.

The LEAP engine, which GE manufactures with France’s Snecma, is scheduled to take off in four years. It will have some parts made from light ceramic composites and others “printed” layer by layer by a new production method called additive manufacturing. “Four decades from now, we could be printing an entire engine this way,” says Michael Idelchik, vice president for advanced technologies at GE Global Research. That’s just in time to replace the last CF6 engine in service.

Eyes on the Nobel Prize: GE Has Employed 2 Nobel Winners, Opened Labs to Others

GE once hired St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson to throw a fastball through a piece high-tech glass. Gibson pitched six innings and failed. GE engineer Ivar Giaever tried something similar on the atomic scale and succeeded. He figured out how to pitch electrons through a thin layer of an insulating material, a technique called electron tunneling. The discovery helped GE build the world’s first full-body magnetic resonance machine (MRI) and earned Giaever a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

October is Nobel Prize season and GE researchers have scored two Nobels of their own. Besides Giaever, GE scientist Irving Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his research on lamp filaments. His work allowed GE to take the first images of blood vessels.

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Ivar Giaever's 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Giaever at the Nobel awards ceremony in Stockholm with his prize.
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Giaever's Nobel acceptance telegram.
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Irving Langmuir received his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932.
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Nobel-winning physicists Richard Feynman, who coined the word nanotechnology, and Ernest O. Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron and whose name graces two U.S. national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley), spent time at GE as research fellows. Martin Perl, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for the discovery of the tau lepton elementary particle, worked at GE as a chemical engineer for two years.

The awards are no accident. GE spends annually $6 billion on R&D. The company develops innovative machines, technologies, and materials, but it also grows its own research talent. “In a company like GE, it was clear that an engineering degree gave you a vast opportunity,” Giaever said. “I got really fired up by that.” He joined an in-house training course for engineers and got his Nobel-winning “tunneling” idea while splitting time between GE’s research lab in Schenectady, New York, and classes at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(RPI), where he was working on a PhD. in physics. "When I grew up in Norway, believe it or not, I knew the name Schenectady,” Giaever told a local paper. “I could even spell it."

Thomas Edison moved the company’s machine works to Schenectady in 1886, and GE opened its research labs close by in 1900. Early visitors to Edison’s labs included radio telegraph inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Niels Bohr, who cracked the structure of the atom, I.P. Pavlov famous for his conditioned dogs, and other Nobel winners.

GE research labs now employ 3,000 people, including 1,125 PhDs. The global research center is still in New York, but GE has labs also in San Ramon, California, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, and Munich. Just in 2011, GE researchers received more than 3,600 patents. All this innovation is helping to create new jobs, and companies. GE’s newest business, GE Energy Storage, makes high-tech Durathon batteries in a new $170 million plant just outside Schenectady.

Then there is the flip side. “Unfortunately, most people take Nobel Prize winner seriously, and that includes some of the Nobel winners themselves,” Giaever told a GE newsletter. “Because I’m a winner, people tend to think that I should have some unique insights into everything, from the Middle East crisis to every conceivable scientific field. Of course, I don’t know any more about them than anyone else, so I’ve got to watch what I say – which I’m not very good at.”

Chips Off the Old Block: Where Michelangelo Once Chiseled, GE Workers Build Engineering Marvels

For millennia artisans and craftsmen flocked to the coastal Tuscan town Carrara and scouted its famous marble quarries for the perfect stone. “Oh cursed a thousand times are the day and the hour when I left Carrara,” Michelangelo Buonarroti wrote to his brother 500 years ago. He made his David from Carrara marble, and died chiseling at a block of the same provenance. The marble is still there and so are the craftsmen. Many, however, don’t chisel stone, but weld steel. They are building some of the world’s largest and most complex engineering marvels: mobile power plants called power "modules."

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Carrara and the adjacent towns of Avenza and Massa are home to a pair of huge plants and testing fields for GE Oil & Gas. At Avenza, GE workers and engineers are working on five gigantic power modules for the Chevron-operated Gorgon Project, one of the world’s largest natural gas developments that is under construction off the northwest coast of Australia. The Greater Gorgon Area gas field holds an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of gas. The power modules, each fitted out with a GE Frame 9 gas turbine, will supply the project with 650 megawatts of electricity used for compressing and cooling natural gas into liquid that can be shipped in supertankers to customers around the world. Chevron has ordered $1.8 billion from GE in machinery and services, including the Avenza power generators. Gorgon is an example of the "tremendous opportunities to grow" for GE's Oil & Gas business. "We've got the right stuff in the right places," Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO told analysts in September. He expects the business to grow "double digits this year and next."

The first of the 90-foot modules, each big enough to cover half of a football field and weighing 2,300 tons, shipped for Australia aboard of a customized Japanese freighter Yamato last Friday. It took the module 4.5 hours to cover the 500-yard distance between the GE plant and the Marina di Carrara port. The behemoth rolled, centipede like, on 578 computerized wheels attached to four orange self-propelled transporters. At one point the module hugged a residential complex so close that a quarter would be too fat to pass between them.

The tight turn was just one of many unique obstacles facing the engineers. GE nearly tripled the size of the Avenza plant to build the modules. The company also quarantined the construction area. The Gorgon modules will generate power on Barrow Island, a pristine nature preserve, where Australian authorities imposed strict environmental regulations to prevent soil and wildlife contamination. As a result, GE workers and welders at the Avenza plant must walk through pressurized air cabins to clean their clothes every time they enter the building lot. An automatic system washes the soles of their shoes. No food or drink with the exception of bottled water is allowed in either. Each module takes more than a year to complete. Workers must apply six miles of structural welding to assemble the steel trusses that support each structure, and attach 12 miles of electric cable.

Some 3,700 people came to the port to see the module on its 12,400-mile journey. If the seas stay fair, the first module will disembark in Australia in 40 days. Its four brethren should ship out by the end of the third quarter next year.

Saving Tiny Lives with help from LED Lights and Warm Beds

Dr. Rajesh Kumar and his team of 20 pediatricians inside Rani Children’s Hospital in the impoverished Indian state of Jharkhand are facing a daunting task. Dr. Kumar is one of the few neonatologists serving Jharkhand, population 32 million. On a typical day, he and his team scramble to care for as many as 100 newborns, some weighing less than two pounds at birth. Technology is a matter of life and death for Dr. Kumar’s tiny patients, and it had been slow to reach them.

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Until last fall, when Rani Children’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit installed first Lullaby baby warmers and phototherapy units from GE. GE built the machines specifically for the Indian market, using a process called “reverse innovation.” Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and author of Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, Win Everywhere, says that smart companies innovate in developing markets, meet local needs and constraints, and then bring the results home. “Once you do that, your solutions become very novel,” he says.



The baby warmer’s easy controls, pictogram buttons, and simple dials, for example, are intuitive and give nurses and doctors more time to focus on the baby, not switches. Hospitals in 65 countries, including some from Western Europe, have placed orders.

Speaking on his cell phone one busy Monday morning from the hospital, Dr. Kumar said that he was managing 50 babies using the Lullaby warmers. “They cannot maintain their own body temperature,” he explained. His staff have been using the warmers in combination with GE's LED phototherapy system. The system is very efficient in treating infants with neonatal jaundice, a common illness caused by an immature liver. If left untreated, bilirubin, the yellow byproduct of dying blood cells, can build up in the body and cause irreversible brain damage. Phototherapy helps transform the bilirubin into a new compound that the baby can excrete. “Technologies like low cost baby warmers and LED phototherapy systems can help save many newborn lives every day, especially in a country like India,” said Dr. Kumar.

The LEDs in the Lullaby last 50,000 hours, almost six years, compared to 1,000 or 2,000 hours for standard fluorescent lamps that require replacement every 3 months and use five times as much energy. The infants depend on the lights to get better, or they must receive a blood transfusion. Lullaby phototherapy devices at Rani Children’s Hospital use LEDs that were developed in India to specifically replace the high-intensity bulbs.

Last month the Lullaby LED phototherapy system won an innovation award from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), ahead of 120 other new entrants in the field of low cost sustainable innovations that help enable better healthcare for more people.

Says Dartmouth’s Govindarajan: “Every GE employee must have a reverse innovation mindset. It’s the biggest opportunity for GE going forward.”

One, Two, Three Strikes, It’s Lights Out: How GE Engineer Reinvented Baseball

Late night baseball is as common as peanuts and Cracker Jack, but it has not always been the case. For many decades baseball was a daytime pursuit. Weekday games often clashed with the company clock and stands were empty. Everything changed in the 1930s when GE lighting designer Robert J. Swackhamer hit on an idea for stadium lights. His lights forever changed the economics of the game. They also saved at least one baseball team from ruin.

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The first night baseball game ever played. Salem beat Lynn 7-2 at the General Electric Athletic Field at Lynn, Massachusetts in June 1927.[/image]
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Swackhamer was thinking about freight trains, not homeruns, when he started working on his lights. In the 1920s, GE’s railroad customers asked Swackhamer to design special arrays of high-wattage lamps to keep rail yards open overnight. The system performed so well that Swackhamer convinced his bosses to try the lights at the General Electric Athletic Field at Lynn, Massachusetts. On June 24, 1927, towers supporting 72 flood lamps illuminated the first night baseball game between Lynn and Salem.

Salem won 7-2 and the packed stands, which included players from the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Americans who played in Boston that afternoon, got the GE sales team thinking. Within three years GE signed up several Minor League teams and by 1935 it had the first big customer. The Cincinnati Reds were on the brink of bankruptcy at the time. No more than 3,000 fans would show up for the average weekday game. Maybe more people will come after work, the Reds owner Powel Crosley and general manager Leland “Larry” MacPhail reasoned. Crosley took a gamble and asked GE to raise the lights over the Reds’ Crosley Field.

The first night game in Major League’s history took place on Friday, May 24, 1935. A crowd of 20,000 people watched the Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1. It was narrow win, but it caused a revolution in baseball. “As soon as I saw the lights come on I knew they were there to stay,” said Cincinnati’s Red Barber who was announcing on the first night. The fans liked the night game idea. The Reds drew 207,000 people in 77 home games in the 1934 season. The team played just seven night games in 1935. They brought in a total of 130,000 fans, or 18,500 visitors on average per game. Not bad for a $50,000 investment.

Some large teams viewed the idea of night games with trepidation. “They wanted to turn me over to the sheriff in 1930 when I put in the first [Minor League] baseball lighting system in Des Moines and said it wouldn’t be long before the major leagues would do it,” Swackhamer told the writer David Pietrusza. He had a point. “Undoubtedly an attempt will be made to introduce night baseball in the major leagues, and it can not be considered lightly,” New York Giants manager John McGraw worried. But many teams soon followed the Reds’ lead. By 1941, 11 of the 16 Major League baseball fields had installed GE lights, including the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and even the Giants.

GE has turned on the lights at 21 baseball arenas around the country, including the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium, the Baltimore Orioles’ Camden Yards, and the San Francisco Giant’s AT&T Park. Lighting a baseball stadium is no trifle. The entire process, from planning to installation, can take roughly two years. Debbie Johnson, a lighting designer with GE Lighting, says the most challenging aspect of the process is “coordinating the fixture locations to achieve the optimum lighting levels.” Johnson says that there are “many obstacles like speakers, scoreboards and banners” that can get in the way. Her colleague, lead lighting designer Rick Owen, says that the “aiming process” is the most arduous part of the job and can take days on non-stop work. “We crisscross the field so many times that we end up walking several miles throughout each day," Owen says. Even details such as the way the grass is mowed effect reflectivity and the end result.

But for Johnson, it’s all good. “I love being able to make the game more enjoyable for fans across the nation,” she says. “In the end, it’s all for them.”

Leaving on a Jet Plane: 70 Years Ago America’s First Jet Took Off, Powered by GE Engines

There were no television cameras to record the top-secret flight, no flowers and champagne to greet the pilot. But his landing has changed the world and the way we live and travel.

On October 2, 1942, test pilot Laurence C. “Bill” Craigie climbed into the cockpit of his experimental jet plane, the Bell XP-59A Airacomet, parked on the flat dry bed of Muroc Lake in California’s Mojave Desert. He briefly taxied on the dusty runway, roared a pair of I-A GE jet engines – the first jet engines made in America – and aimed the plane at the deep blue sky. “The flight itself was quite uneventful,” Craigie told the writer Steve Pace years later. “My clearest recollection of my flight in the XP-59A was the extreme quiet and complete lack of vibration as I took off.” It was the first official jet flight in U.S. history.

Into the Great Wide Open: Bill Craigie took off in his XP-59A Airacomet from Muroc Lake 70 years ago. He climbed to 6,000 feet during the first official jet flight in U.S. history. The Airacomet was powered by two GE jet engines - the first jet engines made in America.

A handful of GE engineers were on hand at the desert military base that day. Joseph Sorota, now 93 years old, is one of the last living veterans of the secret project to build the jet engines. “They called us the Hush-Hush Boys,” Sorota says.

Much of the development work took place inside a wooden shack in the back lot of GE’s plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. In September 1941, Sorota’s team received a large package from England, under attack by Nazi Germany. Inside was one of the world’s first jet engines developed by British Royal Air Force officer Sir Frank Whittle. Because of GE’s extensive experience with turbo superchargers and steam turbines, the U.S. Air Force picked GE to improve on Whittle’s design.

Problems appeared up almost immediately. “We didn’t have the right tools,” Sorota says. “Our tools didn’t fit the screws because they were on the metric system. We had to grind our tools open a little more to get inside.” Calling for help was out of the question. “The work was top secret, we couldn’t call in the maintenance department,” he says. “I was knocking down walls with a jackhammer when we had to make more room for a test chamber.”

In just 10 months, the GE team had an engine ready for flight. Sorota was not at Lake Muroc when Craigie took off. He was back at Lynn, teaching mechanics how to fix the engine inside a public school, which the government commandeered for that purpose. With World War II still raging, the jet engine was the Pentagon’s secret weapon.

GE has been now making jet engines for seven decades. Its jet technology propels small commuter aircraft, high-tech fighter jets, as well as giant A380 double-decker jumbos and even power plants. A quartet of GE engines powers the Presidential Air Force One.

GE, alone and in partnership with firms like France’s Snecma, has built almost 150,000 jet engines. They are linking continents and shrinking the world. Always innovating, the company has introduced revolutionary designs and materials like ceramic composites that boost efficiency and cut weight, fuel costs, and emissions. Where Craigie’s jet engines had each 1,250 pounds of thrust, GE’s largest engine, the GE90-115B, hit 127,500 pounds, a world record. How much is that? Consider that the Redstone rocket that took Alan Shepard to space had just 78,000 pounds of thrust, and the combined thrust of all eight engines that power the huge B-52 Stratofortress bomber clocks in at 136,000 pounds.

Says Tom Brisken, former general manager at GE Aviation: “We apply every piece of technology we have to our advantage.”