Welcome to the Age of Gas: New Report Says Natural Gas Is Becominga "Focal Point" of Global Energy Supply and Demand

A century ago, Edison’s electric light bulb switched off millions of gas lamps illuminating streets, squares and railway stations around the world, and put gas works effectively out of business. But a new GE study titled the Age of Gas says that gas is back and becoming a focal point of global energy supply and demand. “Natural gas… is positioned to rival coal consumption as well as take share from oil on the global stage,” say the study’s authors Peter C. Evans and Michael F. Farina. They write that gas will also increasingly complement wind and other renewable energy sources in power generation.

Evans and Farina say that utilities, global businesses, homes and also trains, trucks and other means of transportation have already embraced natural gas. The analysts expect that gas consumption will grow by more than a third from its current level by 2025. They estimate that international trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG) will increase by 70 percent in this decade alone.

Natural gas will account for 26 percent of primary global energy production by 2025, up from 20 percent in 1990.

The authors point out that natural gas has “significantly lower environmental emissions relative to other fossil fuels.” The "flexibility" of natural gas power plants - they can start up is less that 30 minutes and increase power output at 100 megawatts per minute - can also help utilities incorporate wind and solar power in the grid, which vary with the weather.

The latest flexible combined cycle power plants are reaching thermal efficiencies in excess of 61 percent. That means almost two-thirds of the energy in the natural gas is converted into electricity. The Department of Energy has reportedly likened such efficiency to running a four-minute mile. “The future of gas is not going to be the same as the past,” Evans and Farina write.

In the Middle East, the share of natural gas in power generation already stands at 60 percent. (It is 28 percent in the U.S. and 20 percent in Europe.)

Land-based gas pipelines transport 89 percent of the gas consumed today. They authors say that gas network growth, innovation and new supply options like shale gas are helping create greater gas network density and resilience, and improve economics. “Denser networks contribute to making energy systems more robust and therefore more resilient to disruption and less likely to exhibit extreme price volatility,” they say.

Evans and Farina write that “gas networks, which are often underground, in contrast to road and power grids, can often provide stable service during severe weather events. In this way, gas can contribute broadly to economic resiliency by providing diversification, redundancy, and backup systems.”

The advantages of such distributed power came to light last year during Hurricane Sandy. While large parts of the Northeast were in the dark, a gas turbine located at Princeton University kept the campus lit and warm.

The authors write that innovations like floating LNG technologies and small gas gathering, conversion and transportation systems will also have “dramatic impact” on gas network growth. “The new technologies that help integrate and transform small-scale LNG and CNG [compressed natural gas] systems into ‘virtual pipelines’ will be important to the rapid development of new gas markets like the transportation sector,” they write.

They also believe that the Industrial Internet, which links data from machine sensors to people and software, will bring new tools for monitoring, control and analytics of pipelines, generators and other technology.

“One defining characteristic of networks is that they become more valuable with size as more entities join the network,” Evans and Farina write. “These characteristics facilitate the development of adjacent networks, uncovering hidden opportunities to create value as new links are established.”

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The Simple Goals of Complex Systems: Nobel Laureate James E. Rothman Talks About Nanomachines, Cutting Through the Fog, Personalized Medicine and the Benefits of Becoming Fish Wrap

On October 7, biologist James E. Rothman received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine together with colleagues Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof. Rothman is a professor of biomedical sciences at Yale. Over the last decade he has served as a senior advisor to GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. He is also a former chief scientist at GE Healthcare. GE Reports managing editor Tomas Kellner talked to Rothman last week about his discovery, innovation, and GE.

Nobel laureate James Rothman worked as chief scientist at GE Healthcare. "In the university we talk a lot about collaboration, discovery through bringing together disciplines," he says. "I have never seen it work anywhere as well as at GE Global Research."

The Nobel committee is known in the U.S. for what may be the world’s most exhilarating wake up call. Where were you when you learned the news that you won a Nobel?

I was at home and I was in bed. The phone rang and there was a very pleasant Swedish voice bringing good news. It turned out that I had met the gentleman who was calling, Göran Hansson, at a scientific conference a couple of years ago. He is the Secretary of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The Nobel committee recognized you and your two colleagues for “solving the mystery” of how cells transport molecules like insulin to the right place in the cell and at the right time. Why is that important?

The body is made up of many different types of cells that make up your muscle, your liver or the nerve cells in your brain. These cells need to communicate with each other, otherwise they get out of synch and the liver won’t function like a liver.

Adding even more complexity, the different organs need to talk to each other. For example, when you eat a meal, your intestines are digesting the food and producing sugar that goes into the blood. The pancreas is detecting the sugar and secreting insulin to control and distribute the sugar throughout the body. There have to be signals or information flowing between the components of the system in order for it to function in a coherent way. Every electrical engineer will understand this. The work we have done has elucidated how those signals are produced and passed between cells.

It is interesting that you mention engineering. Your Nobel is in physiology and medicine, you studied medicine, but you left medical school and trained as a physicist.

I am not a physicist in any professional sense. But like many people at GE who are engineers, my initial education was in math and physics. I later moved toward molecular biology.

You said in an interview that what attracted you to molecular biology was the opportunity to find simplicity. Can you explain it? Biology seems inherently messy.

I’ve observed that biologists fall into two camps. There are those who seek simplicity and find it, and then there are those who seek complexity and revel in it. I know that sounds a little odd, but I think it’s true.

The goal of a complex system can actually be very simple. Its core function could be almost mechanical, like a little machine. In fact, we found that this is the case. Most of cell biology is carried out by proteins that are very complex on one level, but when you look at them through an electron microscope, they behave just like little nanomachines. So you have something than can be very complex, involving interactions of tens of thousands of atoms in multiple combinations and a complex interface between two proteins, or it can be conceptualized for example as a hammer hitting a nail, because one of the proteins looks like a hammer and the other looks like a nail.

You cannot get a simpler system than that.

If you have orientation to physics, where you always expect some simplicity and generality as distinct from the way biology is usually approached, it’s possible to make better progress in a complex field and cut through the fog more easily.

You could use these simple building blocks to create a much more complex picture and gain a deeper understanding.

That’s exactly right. The very complex behaviors of healthy and diseased organs are now being modeled increasingly using tools similar to what electrical engineers use. This approach extracts the essence and represents a profound simplification. This so called systems biology is becoming an important tool for example in the pharmaceutical industry. It will be an important clinical tool down the road for qualifying patients for treatments.

Such personalized medicine is a goal that GE is also pursuing. When did you start working at GE?

My history with GE goes back to early 2000s when GE acquired Amersham. That company brought to GE a great strength in life sciences. This truly differentiates GE from major industrial companies. I served for several years as chief scientist at GE Healthcare, which was then a new business formed by the combination of Amersham and GE’s imaging unit, GE Medical. I also started working in a high-level advisory role at GE Global Research (GRC). We essentially moved the Amersham research group from New Jersey to GRC and we’ve seen so many rewards from that move over the years.

Why was this move so important?

At first, the biologists were out in the left field and the GRC engineers didn’t really know how to relate to them even. They were working on two completely different sets of projects. But over the years we’ve seen the biology culture infuse and inform almost every aspect of research across the healthcare business. The development of digital pathology is an important example. Ten years ago we were not in digital pathology at all. If you think about it, that’s kind of interesting, because GE is a predominant company in the imaging space.

Can you explain the connection between medical imaging and pathology?

Pathologists use a microscope, rather than an MRI or ultrasound machine, to analyze a large numbers of cells. It’s subjective, it’s not digital, it’s qualitative, it’s all the things that radiology is not. But we were able to develop digital pathology because of the infusion of biology in the engineering.

Is digital pathology a tool that could help us advance personalized medicine?

Digital pathology paves the road for digitizing the pathology department. Once the environment is digital, data are created and stored in an archive in instantly manageable and accessible forms. This creates the platform for personalized medicine.

But this is just the first step. Step two is the development of molecular pathology at GRC, and that still continues. The acquisition of Clarient a few years ago was a major step in this direction. This is a big deal in clinical medicine and, eventually, cancer treatment. While digital pathology purely concerns capturing and storing microscope images of samples like tumor biopsies, molecular pathology images numerous potential cancer causing genes within the tumor, allowing pinpoint diagnoses and targeted treatments.

How often do you visit GRC?

I am usually in Niskayuna two days a month. I work very closely with the scientists and the advanced technology there, particularly John Burczak and Nadeem Ishaque, who are great leaders. I have the privilege of working with a great number of very talented people, including Mike Idelchik [vice president for advanced technologies] and Mark Little [GE senior vice president and chief technology officer], whose leadership is really quite extraordinary.

You have a busy academic career as chair of the cell biology department at Yale. What makes you go back to GRC?

Having had the experience of working with other companies as an adviser, I can tell you that there is no greater company in the world. It is absolutely my privilege to be a part of GE. The value system, the business focus, the innovation that goes on at GRC are all astonishing.

In the university we talk a lot about collaboration, discovery through bringing together disciplines. I have never seen it work anywhere as well as at GRC. The needs of the various business segments way outside of healthcare are appreciated by the people at GRC through the very nature of the lab. That sort of non-quantifiable knowledge has a way of leveraging across the whole of GE.

People who do not really understand GE describe us as a conglomerate. Sure, we are very broadly based. But what I see from the standpoint of GE Global Research is a company that has technology platforms that add enormous value that goes way beyond the conglomerate [label]. I see it every time I am at GRC and it excites me because I learn so much from my colleagues there.

How do you compare university research, or blue-sky research, and the type of research that goes on at GRC, which is looking for commercial applications? Are there benefits to having a product in mind?

Absolutely. GE does that so impressively.

Academia is largely supported by the public because of what you call the blue-sky aspect, with the hope that some of that will translate it into outcomes that benefit the society broadly. That of course happens.

GE Global Research has many, many tentacles and connections into the academia. GRC has labs all over the world and we have excellent relationship with excellent investigators at the top universities. We go to meetings, we publish, and we are understood to be leaders. That’s very important because it gives us visibility and it gives us access. It allows us to be part of the ecosystem in the way that we function, which is synthesizing the blue sky developments, the best of them, that occur anywhere in the world.

We take those developments, the best of them and we infuse them with the shorter term needs of the various businesses. Out of that ferment emerge projects that have perhaps a longer term timeline than what the business would ordinarily be excited about. It’s very powerful. I am not aware of any other large industrial that has the kind of leverage that we have.

Have you started working on your Nobel lecture? Do you have a topic in mind?

That’s a good question. The ceremony is scheduled for early December in Stockholm. I have not started working on my Nobel Lecture, which is a special lecture of more than average importance. This week there has been a lot of interest from the press. I trust that it will go away by next week as we become fish wrap.

I am also trying to get some sleep. I’ve been going on three to four hours of sleep all week. If I conveyed any measure of coherence today, that in itself should be worth of a Nobel Prize.

Thank you for your time.

Curing By Numbers: Taking Cloud Computing to a New Level

American healthcare has by far the most expensive system in the world, but few would argue that it's also the most efficient. A recent study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found that almost 40 percent of patients are misdiagnosed in primary care¹. Another report by the American College of Physicians discovered that unnecessary testing and medical procedures, and extra days in the hospital caused by wrong diagnosis could add up to $800 billion per year². That's close to a third of all U.S. healthcare costs. “There is a lot of waste in the system,” says Jeanine Banks, general manager of marketing at GE Healthcare IT. “We want to help rein in the costs and make the system far more efficient.”

That’s not just talk. Engineers at GE Healthcare IT are developing a new “cloud imaging” solution that will allow doctors to create a professional profile, store patient images and data together in one place, view 3D images from anywhere, and access intuitive analytics. “It’s like LinkedIn professional networking meets diagnostic imaging,” Banks says. “It’s all about virtually limitless computing, storage and collaboration on tough cases to help healthcare teams make more informed decisions.”

A new GE big data system that stores medical information in the cloud could help doctors improve patient diagnosis.

Banks says that the information physicians need to make diagnoses is often fragmented and sits in siloes. The new platform, GE’s Cloud Imaging solution, allows doctors to exchange images and use social digital tools to share cases with each other over a network instead of distributing CDs, as common practice now. “They can open their browser, click on a link and share quickly,” she says.

Banks says that GE intends to give hospitals the flexibility to host the system on their own servers, as a private cloud, or through GE’s public cloud environment. “We are committed to using industry standards to make it easy to connect medical devices, link with existing PACS (picture archiving and communication systems) and EMR (electronic medical records environments), and enable consistent access to a flourishing ecosystem of apps,” she says. “Providers don’t need more silos of data.”

GE’s first Cloud Imaging pilot site is the Kadlec Health System in Washington State. Kadlec is helping evaluate the platform ahead of plans to demonstrate the new solution during the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in December. “It’s an opportunity for them to use it inside their health system and give us feedback,” Banks says.

For Banks, this is the beginning of a new healthcare revolution. “What if together with industry we could help physicians reduce waste?” she asks. “We could process that information, learn from past diagnostic decisions and store the data all in the cloud to inform future decisions. One day, we could tap into knowledge based on cases from around the world.”

That’s just brilliant.

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¹ Journal of American Medical Association 2012
² Reuter’s, citing study by American College of Physicians

A Ticket to Profit: New Cloud Tech Could Make Airlines Richer and Pilots Wiser

No barrier to running a profitable airline looms larger than the cost of jet fuel. U.S. airlines spend more than a third of their operating budgets on fuel, or $50 billion in 2012. Every penny increase in the price per gallon costs the industry $180 million annually.

Unlike cars, ships and other, less lofty means of transportation, planes can’t tap alternative sources of energy like natural gas and electricity. With profits margins running at mere 2 percent of operating expenses, flying more fuel efficient planes is often the ticket to profit. “The good news is that there are always better ways to operate and save fuel,” says Giovanni Spitale, general manager at GE’s Flight Efficiency Services (FES) business.

GE launched FES to help airlines improve operations and save fuel. “With the combination of historical and current information, we can make optimized decisions about flight plans and fuel load,” Spitale says. “Planes don’t have to carry all that extra fuel weight if they don’t need it. But you have to present the pilot with enough information to make that decision based on science and good data. He ultimately carries the responsibility for the plane.”

“With the combination of historical and current information, we can make optimized decisions about flight plans and fuel load,” says Giovanni Spitale, general manager at GE’s Flight Efficiency Services.

FES engineers have built a new big data system that can gather and analyze real-time data generated by aircraft, crunch historical information about flight plans and fuel loads, digest internal policies and procedures, and combine it with airspace maps obtained from aviation authorities. “We have the data science expertise to tease out the relevant information,” Spitale says. “But we also build jet engines and understand the physical aspect of aviation. We can scale the two and help improve fuel management, navigation, flight analytics, and fleet synchronization.”

Spitale says the system can also help fine tune internal policies. An airline can instruct pilots to reduce gas-guzzling take-off thrust at 1,500 feet. “We can measure when and where that’s appropriate and whether pilots are following the plan,” he says.

Airlines like Taiwan’s EVA Airways and Garuda Indonesia have signed up to use FES to manage fuel. GE is already working with Brazil’s GOL Airlines on reducing annual fuel costs by as much as 2 percent, or $90 million over the next five years. GE is also helping 10 Brazilian airports and aviation authorities ease air traffic congestion.

FES was among the 14 Industrial Internet technologies released by GE at the Minds and Machines summit in Chicago yesterday. “Very small changes drive very high outcomes for our customers,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said at the summit. “This is the future of our service business.”

Turning Profit: How the Wind and the Cloud Make it Rain

Ever since GE wind turbines started popping up around the world a decade ago, engineers kept adding hardware and upgrading software to make them more productive. Andy Holt, general manager for projects and services at GE Renewable Energy, says that the advent of big data and the secure industrial cloud now allow engineers to take the next step.

New wind farm software and hardware technology from GE called PowerUp will let customers monitor wind farm performance in real time and boost power output by as much as 5 percent per turbine. This can translate to a 20 percent increase in profit. “That’s huge,” says Holt. “PowerUp gives us a bunch of dials and levers that let us tune the different elements of the wind turbine to make it operate at an optimal level.”

These dials and levers use turbine data to manage the drivetrain speed and torque, the pitch of the blades and the yaw of the nacelle. They also monitor aerodynamics and other turbine controls helping the farm produce reliable power.

The software is continuously "tuning" the turbine and locks in the best settings. For example, the speed and the torque of the turbine affect generator voltage and blade noise. The yaw of the nacelle has influence on the energy yield and mechanical loads.

There are 22,000 GE wind turbines installed around the world.

PowerUp was among 14 new Industrial Internet technologies that GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled during yesterday’s Minds and Machines summit in Chicago.

The platform joins other Industrial Internet wind farm technologies like GE's PulsePOINT. That system monitors the condition of equipment and uses algorithms to detect anomalies like unusual vibrations, hot bearings, and low power production. “The turbines are aware of themselves and check with their neighbors to see if they are underperforming,” Holt says. “If they are, they put in a work order and call us, saying, ‘Hey, I’m making 1.4 megawatts of power and my neighbor is making 1.5. I have a lot of vibration on this bearing. Come fix me!’”

The PowerUp platform uses a suite of performance dials and levers to fine tune a wind turbine’s operation and help enhance its energy production. Through a detailed loads, reliability and performance analysis utilizing historical SCADA data, a turbine will lock in the best settings from an iterative tuning process. Based upon a turbine’s specific wind regime and characteristics, the end result will be a customized PowerUp that seeks to maximize annual energy production.

14 New GE Industrial Internet Technologies Move Machines Closer to Zero Unplanned Downtime

There is more than one way to fly a plane. When the weather is good and the skies are open at the destination airport, pilots can cut costs by loading less fuel and shedding the extra weight. But they need good information to make the call.

GE just made the decision easier. The company's Flight Efficiency Services system (FES) is one of 14 big data technologies released today to help airlines, energy companies, hospitals and other customers cut downtime, improve productivity, and reduce emissions.

GE software engineers are using a "first-of-its-kind" industrial-strength software development platform called Predix to build the applications. The platform provides a standard and secure way to create apps for any machine or device connected to the Industrial Internet, a digital network that links machines, sensors generating data, people and the cloud. “Industrial data is not only big, it’s the most critical and complex type of big data,” says Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO. “Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyze this data in a highly secure way to deliver better outcomes for customers and society.”

GE has also partnered with AT&T, Cisco and Intel to improve data flow and boost wired and wireless connectivity.

Immelt is speaking today at GE’s Minds and Machines conference in Chicago.

"Standing next to a blowout preventer, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt opened the Minds and Machines conference in Chicago today. New GE Industrial Internet technology called Drilling iBox gathers and analyzes industrial data from the subsea machine, and allows drilling rig crews to minimize unplanned downtime."

Immelt says that GE is developing predictive software and hardware systems and industrial sensors that constantly measure machine performance, identify productivity gains and reduce unplanned downtime. “Observing, predicting and changing performance is how the Industrial Internet will help airlines, railroads and power plants operate at peak efficiency,” he says.

Brazil’s Gol Airlines, for example, is using GE's FES software to analyze and track its flight routes and optimize fuel consumption. The airline predicts that the system will save $90 million over the next five years. St. Luke’s Medical Center is using GE software to manage and analyze patient and equipment data. The system has already helped the hospital shave 51 minutes from bed turnaround time and reduce patient wait times.

GE launched the first 10 Industrial Internet products last year. The products have brought in $290 million in revenues and another $400 million in orders to date. The company said that it plans to leverage its high-margin $160 billion services backlog to develop more predictive technologies, grow software sales, and help customers become even more efficient.

Depth of Knowledge: New Industrial Internet System Can Monitor Deep Sea Drilling Equipment

Blowout preventers, or BOPs, are among the biggest and most complex machines that most of us will never see. These 50,000-pound 60-foot-tall safety valves made from 70,000 component parts sit on top of pressurized oil and gas wells thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. They serve as the last line of defense if something in the well goes wrong.

Many BOP parts have different lifespans and the massive machines have to be periodically pulled up and serviced. Workers perform much of the maintenance on a BOP at set time intervals because real-time information about the condition of the parts and usage is sparse. That information gap got a team of GE oil and gas engineers and software developers thinking: “We need to move from the ‘break-fix’ model to a maintenance model where we can advise customers to service a component based on measurements of its performance,” says Bob Judge, director of product management at GE Oil & Gas. “What if you had technology gathering BOP data so that the next time you pull it out, you know exactly what needs to be replaced and have the replacement parts available on the drilling rig? This information could save millions of dollars in unplanned downtime, adding substantial value for our customers and for their customers.”

BOPs are 50,000-pound 60-foot-tall safety valves made from 70,000 component parts. They serve as the last line of defense if something in the well goes wrong.

The team spent the last couple of years studying data from existing BOP controls systems and came up with the Drilling iBox solution. This combination of software and hardware sensors allows drilling rig crews to gather data about valve positions, pressures, temperatures and well bore conditions and turn it into useful information. “The screen of the D-iBox is showing the workers the health of the BOP components, how many cycles they have gone through, and what needs to be fixed and when,” Judge says. “When there is a problem, the drilling contractor will know within seconds.”

Judge said that he had an epiphany when he saw a demonstration of myEngines, an Industrial Internet application for GE’s Aviation business. It allows airlines to remotely monitor the status of their engine fleet and streamline scheduling, maintenance and repair. “I thought if we could substitute “BOP” for “engine”, we could use the same model to benefit the drilling industry that has been proven to work for jet engines,” Judge says.

The first D-iBox pilot will start this fall and two others by the first quarter of 2014. . Only drilling contractors and owners will have access to data collected by the system. But Judge points out that there are significant advantages to encouraging data-sharing with GE. “Gathering data across different users will accelerate the types of predictive rules our software engineers can create,” he says.

Judge says that "everyone benefits when we can advise replacement or maintenance intervals based on the widest universe of user data possible. We can also see this type of operational data as an important piece of the whole cradle-to-grave genealogy of the components of a BOP system."

"Telling a customer what to fix after it has failed is relatively easy," he says. "Telling them to fix something before it costs them money is the magic.”

No More Unplanned Downtime: GE Report Finds Industrial Internet Could Lead to “Profound Transformation” in Way Humans Work, Boost Productivity by $20 Billion

A gas turbine service manual can clock in at 1,000 pages, about the length of a small-type version of War & Peace. Crews often haul the tomes from one remote location to another to do maintenance work. They travel on a set timetable and lack real-time information about the condition of the turbines. “If they come too late and failure occurs, unplanned downtime can cascade across the system and affect the economy,” says GE Chief Economist Marco Annunziata.

But there is a better way. Soon workers will be able to store and access maintenance information on simple handheld devices, brainstorm repairs with colleagues, and even monitor and talk to the turbines themselves. Annunziata and Peter C. Evans, director of global strategy and analytics at GE, just released a new report titled Industrial Internet@Work, which is making a case for a new way of unleashing the power of information in the workplace. They found that time and money “wasted largely due to deficiencies in how information is gathered, stored, accessed and shared” on servicing machines serving just a handful of industries could amount to more than 300 million man-hours, or $20 billion per year.

Annunziata and Evans write that the Industrial Internet, which brings together the digital and machine worlds, could help people work more efficiently and productively with machines, allow them to collaborate and share information faster, and profoundly transform the workplace. They say that “a key feature of the Industrial Internet is that information itself becomes intelligent. When workers need it, information will find them—they will not need to hunt for it.”


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The authors argue that the Industrial Internet - enabled by increased connectivity, collaboration, data analytics, and cloud-based software and mobile apps - will change the work experience for hundreds of thousands of workers, from field engineers and drilling rig workers to pilots, doctors and nurses. “The Industrial Internet will empower them with faster access to relevant information, relying on analytics generating new insights, [and] mobile collaboration tools revolutionizing the way that information is shared and disseminated,” they write. “Machines will play an active part in this; connected and communicative machines will be able to self-monitor, self-heal, and proactively send information to other machines and to their human partners.”

Sometime in the near future, a wind farm engineer will travel with a wireless device that can indicate which turbine needs attention and which needs to be fixed. The same device will store and transmit technical information and enable the engineer to share video with colleagues at other locations to instantly tap their expertise.

Will machines make people redundant? Annunziata and Evans disagree. They write that companies must play a pivotal role in educating workers and teaching them new skills. Annunziata argues that “a new, highly-skilled workforce will emerge as the Industrial Internet is poised to have a significant impact.” He and Evans say that the innovations discussed in their paper will “augment and enhance the abilities of workers, enabling them to work with greater efficiency, better results, and greater productivity,” and turn “industrial operators into skilled information-workers,”

Writes Annunziata: “Workers will be racing with the new, intelligent machines of the Industrial Internet, not against them—more Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times.”

Analyze This: The Industrial Internet by the Numbers & Outcomes

Speaking at last year’s Minds and Machines conference in San Francisco, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said that a global network connecting people, data and machines called the Industrial Internet had the potential to add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP over the next 20 years. He announced that GE would invest $1 billion in developing Industrial Internet technology and applications to make customers more productive. “I read sometimes that people think that the big era of productivity is over,” Immelt said. “But we see multiple ways for new productivity that are here today.” Immelt said that industrial companies are “no longer just about the big iron. All of us will seek to interface with the analytics, the data and the software that’s around our products.”

GE businesses from aviation to healthcare have released a number of new products that harness the power of the Industrial Internet. Take a look at the outcomes they have achieved on the on the eve of GE’s second U.S. Minds and Machines conference, which takes place this Wednesday in Chicago.

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GE Aviation and Accenture launched Taleris in 2012. The joint-venture provides airlines and cargo carriers with tools to predict, prevent and recover from operational disruptions like those caused by severe weather. The FAA estimates that delays cost airlines more than $8.3 billion in 2010. But Taleris President and CEO Norm Baker says that “significant benefits can be realized through our predictive analytics technologies which leverage an aircraft’s data within the context of the operations so one can address an issue before it occurs.” Andy Heather, vice president of engineering at Taleris, agrees. “The aircraft is clearly the airline’s biggest and most important asset,” he said. “Traditionally, however, the aircraft has not been well connected into the airlines’ digital systems, operations and maintenance to the same degree, leaving significant potential value unrealized.” Airlines like Etihad Airways have already signed up.
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When TransCanada Corp. decided to overhaul New York City’s largest power plant, it deployed GE’s Industrial Internet software and hardware. Rather than spending hundreds of millions on new equipment, TransCanada connected data sensors to software and started gathering and analyzing data critical to the performance of the plant’s largest gas turbine. The system, called FlexEfficiency Advantage Advanced Gas Path, is using the data to fine-tune the turbine to make sure that it is always running at its optimal level. “It’s real time and it’s interactive,” says John McWilliams, vice president of energy operations at TransCanada. “As things are changing, the control system is responding and always optimizing the unit.” As a result of the upgrade Ravenswood is now using less fuel to produce the same amount of power, making electricity cheaper and, relatively speaking, cleaner. TransCanada says that the upgrade has increased output by 5 percent. That’s enough electricity to power 10,000 NYC households.
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  In May engineers at GE’s renewable energy business unveiled the “world’s first brilliant wind turbine.” The turbine is loaded with sensors and powerful software that can communicate with other turbines and even other wind farms. It has the option to come with a battery that allows producers and the wind turbines themselves to make decisions based on data coming in and supply predictable power in the short-term. “We are using advanced forecasting algorithms and a small amount of battery storage to meet a forecast of how much power we will be able to deliver for the next 15 minutes to one hour,” says Keith Longtin, general manager for wind products at the GE business. The sensors and software alone can make the GE2.5-120 wind turbine 25 percent more efficient and 15 percent more productive than comparable GE models.
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  A single GE Evolution Series locomotive can pull a load equivalent to 170 Boeing 747 jetliners. That’s impressive, but for innovative railroads like Norfolk Southern, brawn is no longer good enough. They employ locomotive engineers as well as software engineers and gather gigabytes of data about their trains and rails. “We know where every tree is growing beside the track,” Deborah Butler, Norfolk Southern’s chief information officer told data journalist Jon Bruner from O’Reilly Media.

Norfolk Southern feeds that data to software systems like GE’s Trip Optimizer. Bruner calls Trip Optimizer “a kind of autopilot for locomotives” that “observes the entire context of a journey – that consists of a train, grades along its route, the urgency of its delivery – and controls [the locomotive's] throttle in real time.” Butler told Brunner that Trip Optimizer, together with another piece of GE railroad software called Movement Planner cut her company’s fuel usage by 6.3 percent and increased speed by 10 to 20 percent.
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What do Twitter updates, NASA’s tree-spotting satellite, and special effects from a Tom Cruise thriller have in common with the utility poles outside your house? They help power companies to keep the lights on. In January GE rolled out a new grid management system called Grid IQ Insight that harvests diverse data from social media, smart meters, satellites, the weather service, the U.S. census and other sources to help utilities predict and prevent electrical outages. The system allows utility workers to manipulate the information with their hands, a la Cruise in the movie Minority Report. Trees that fall on wires is one headache that the system can tackle. “One of the companies we work with spends $70 million a year trimming trees,” says Jonathan Garrity, product manager at GE Digital Energy. “By combining outage, weather and satellite data we can make vegetation management more targeted, improving reliability and keeping these costs low.”
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Nobody likes waiting and doctors at Florida’s Aventura Hospital and Medical Center hate crowded waiting rooms as much as their patients. Last year, Aventura invested in AgileTrac, a GE software system pooling and crunching gigabytes of patient and equipment data zipping across a hospital-size Industrial Internet. Each patient now receives an electronic wristband during admission. The wristband automatically checks in as patients arrive in their beds, travel around the hospital, and check out. Similar tags track IV pumps, heart monitors and other equipment. Aventura estimates that AgileTrac has cut more than 3,000 hours in discharge time at the 400-bed hospital over nine months and freed up the emergency room. “We are doing much better now than a year ago,” says Karen Bibbo, chief nursing officer at Aventura’s parent, HCA East Florida.
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  If the Industrial Internet is the nervous system that animates machines of the new industrial age, then the heavy-duty printed circuit board assemblies, or PCBAs, designed and manufactured at GE’s new plant in Minden, Nevada, are the nerves and neurons that lash it all together. The plant, which opened in June, is part of GE Oil & Gas and serves as a one-stop workshop where GE engineers develop and test PCBAs monitoring machinery used by businesses as diverse as oil and gas, power generation, automotive manufacturing and health care. The Industrial Internet has the potential to add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP over the next 20 years.
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Vamoose in Space: Forgotten Escape Pod Sought to Bring Astronauts Home Safe

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  In the 1960s, a team of GE engineers proposed a design for a single-person space escape pod called Man Out of Space Easiest (later changed to Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment), or MOOSE.
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MOOSE at work.
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  A detailed image of the escape pod.
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  A concept drawing of escape capsule.
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Commercial spaceflight is fast becoming reality. In fact, well-heeled passengers can already book seats on the first private space flights. This brings up an interesting question: What will safety devices look like in passenger spacecraft?

It turns out that GE engineers have already given it some thought. In honor of #GravityDay on Sunday - 9.8 meters per second squared is roughly the rate of acceleration of objects free-falling near Earth's surface – we dusted off a proposal dating back to the 1960s. At the time, a team of engineers proposed a design for a single-person space escape pod called Man Out of Space Easiest (later changed to Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment), or MOOSE.

The engineers designed MOOSE to weigh just 200 pounds and fit inside a suitcase-sized container. It used a small rocket motor for power and contained a PET film (the flexible silver-colored plastic material used by marathon runners and emergency crews) as a heat shield, two pressurized canisters filled with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.

Astronauts in an emergency would leave the craft wearing a space suit, climb inside the PET bag and fill it with the insulating foam. The motor, as shown in the diagram, sticks out of the bag and eases the astronaut safely into the atmosphere. Once the astronaut falls to about 30,000 feet above Earth’s surface, a parachute deploys and slows descent to 17 mph. This is when the foam comes into play, serving as a cushion for when the astronaut touches down (it could also be used as a flotation device should the person land in water). The astronauts would then use radio to signal rescuers.

MOOSE was intended only for extreme situations and the effort to realize the design was later abandoned. Many advances in materials and technology have occurred since then. Some of them were on display during daredevil Felix Baumgartner’s free-fall from the stratosphere last year.

Brave New Home: Designers See Self-Stocking Fridges and Clothes-Folding Washers in Our Future

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome1.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The smart faucet in GE's Home 2025 not only dispenses filtered water, but also ice and carbonated water, vitamins and various beverages. Just place your finger on the faucet and the built-in hydration sensor lets you instantly see your hydration level. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome2.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Save space and time in GE's Home 2025. A cutting board doubles as the dishwasher lid, and sliding mesh dividers in the prep area keep produce cooled and easily accessible.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome3.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]With the in-sink dishwasher in GE's Home 2025, wash small loads in just 5 minutes. Integrated sensors in the sink alert you when chemicals or bacteria are present in your produce, so you can keep washing your produce until the readout says the contaminants are gone. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome4.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Sustainability will be integral to living in the future, driven by urbanization, frugality and climate change. Household appliances must use minimal water, or be able use recycled water. Advances in filtration and sanitization technology will help keep laundry and dishwasher appliances from getting too thirsty. Gray water from the dishwasher in GE's Home 2025 is recycled back through and can be used for the sustainable growing wall, where herbs and vegetables are harvested.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome5.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]  In GE's Home 2025, it's easy to turn your food disposal into compost mode and create compost pellets. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome6.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Packed in a 27-inch-wide design, the oven in GE's Home 2025 exhibit combines the efficiency of an induction cooktop, Advantium® Speedcook oven, sensor cooking, and a traditional thermal oven into a single unit. The interchangeable and integrated induction accessories allow for unlimited and exciting culinary exploration, as well as more cabinet space when stored in the integrated storage drawer below. No longer confined to predetermined burner locations, pots and pans can be placed anywhere you see fit. Cooking is now more collaborative and connected when using your smart phone to monitor the status from the comfort of your sofa.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome7.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Imagine virtual experts who can help you learn to cook from the convenience of your own home or prepare great meals with friends around the country virtually. In GE's home of the future, improvements to voice recognition, motion plus facial recognition and deep-thinking technology will create "human" simulations of experts in fields like cooking. Sensors in kitchen appliances, as well as virtual cooking tutors will give instructions tailored to your skill level and interests, so meals come out perfect every time. Friends and family can even share a celebrity chef experience with a replica of a famous maestro giving instructions to make it more of a party than lesson. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome8.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]  In GE's Home 2025, this innovative laundry machine not only washes and dries, it stores clothing items in convenient pellet form, and then revives clothes for immediate wear or dispenses them in compressed form for travel. Commercial, public compressors and revivers are found in many common areas around the city.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome9.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The laundry machine in GE's Home 2025 displays a virtual closet for you to choose items from, even suggesting matching outfits or clothing based on weather. You can even plan your entire wardrobe for the week. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome10.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]No need to remember what medications to take when living in GE's Home 2025. Just place your hand on the mirror, and the Medical Dispenser reads your vital signs and decides the amount of medication needed for the day. The machine combines, processes and dispenses the medication in liquid form. Medication cartridges can be easily reloaded.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome111.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]No need to drive to a store and grocery shop with GE's Home 2025. Shop anywhere by searching on your smart device. Then have your groceries delivered directly to your front door, even while you're away. A device installed outside of your home keeps delivered items cool or warm until you return. Containers conveniently plug into the refrigerator, and empty containers are collected for reuse. [/image]
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When the Czech-born industrial design maven Arthur N. BecVar ran appliance design at GE in the in the 1950s, he warned his team that consumers were too smart to settle for fancy styles and urged them to focus on “materials usage, energy conservation … and human factors.” His vision got firm outlines in 1960, when BecVar asked his team to design and build the kitchen of the future. They’ve got a lot it right. They nailed the induction cooktop, the refrigerator ice dispenser and the freezer. Even their ultrasonic dishwashers are about to enter the kitchen.


BecVar’s kitchen of the future from 1960 got many things right. His automatic plastic dishmaker even anticipated 3D printing.

Now BecVar’s successor, Lou Lenzi, and his team are looking to the year 2025, when the always-connected world but also ecological and health issues like water scarcity and aging population come calling. “This isn’t about the Jetsons or pie in the sky,” says Lenzi. “It’s about reality-based innovation that will be possible over the next decade.”

Lenzi says that the project, called Home 2025, explores the intersection of society, culture and technology, and everyday life. “We conceptualized how we will prepare meals, wash clothes, and interact with information as families over the next dozen years.”

Lenzi says that some of the key themes that emerged include the death of the single-purpose appliance, automated food delivery, and biometric machines that can dispense medication and give more independence to older consumers. This means, for example, that laundry machines will wash, dry and store clothes in “convenient pellets,” then “revive” them for immediate wear, and dispense them in “compressed form” for travel.

Can somebody press fast forward, please?

Critical Thinking: How Aviation Turned Energy Crisis into a Sputnik Moment

The oil embargo of 1973 was a miserable period when American towns banned Christmas lights to save electricity, billboards urged citizens to “turn off the damn lights,” and filling stations dispensed gasoline “by appointment only” to “regular customers.” Like the Sputnik launch 15 years before, the crisis shocked the nation and got Americans thinking seriously about innovation and energy security. Businesses and the government started searching together for radical new ways to improve fuel efficiency.

One such program was NASA’s quest to develop an energy-efficient engine for commercial aircraft known as the E³ (E-cubed) program. GE joined early on and the resulting improvements in fuel efficiency and weight reduction changed the economics of aviation forever. “This multi-year development program for a more efficient turbofan engine core formed the basis for the GE90 engine, which is the most reliable and energy efficient engine in its class,” says Dale Carlson, general manager for technology strategy at GE Aviation.

Carlson says that NASA’s $200 million investment in the late 1970s and the early 1980s enabled a $3 billion investment by the industry in generations of high-bypass turbofans like the GE90-115B, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine, the GEnx for the Dreamliner and the GE9X engine, which is currently in development. The GE90 and GEnx engines already generated billions in sales and could support thousands of jobs over 30 years, Carlson estimates.

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The E³ program helped GE develop the experimental GE36 open rotor engine in the 1980s. It used carbon fiber composite blades and a hybrid design combining turbofan and turboprop engines. It demonstrated fuel savings of more than 30 percent compared with similar-sized jet engines with conventional fan systems.
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GE never launched its engine commercially, though it was recognized worldwide as a technology breakthrough. The composite blade technology now serves inside GE’s latest engines like the GEnx.
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Besides the engine core, the E³ program also helped GE design and build the first jet engine with light, carbon-fiber composite fan blades. (The design was so appealing that one blade is now on display inside New York’s Museum of Modern Art.). “There are few, if any, technologies flying today that did not benefit from this strategic partnership” between NASA and the U.S. aerospace industry, said John Kinney, director of advanced programs business development at GE Aviation.

NASA recently invited GE to take part in a new development program that is building on the E³'s legacy. The program will focus on fast-tracking advanced composite materials through certification and regulatory acceptance. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to certify composite materials for aerospace use from the typical decade to two years. Companies involved in the new research include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and others.

GE will be on its fourth-generation of carbon fiber composite fan blades by the time the GE9X enters service later in this decade. The engine will have only 16 blades, down from 22 inside the GE90-115B, even though its 11-foot diameter will top the older engine. The blades together with a new composite fan case and lightweight ceramic matrix composite (CMCs) materials inside the engine will remove hundreds of pounds from the machine and improve fuel efficiency.

CMCs are yet another material that GE and partners developed in conjunction with NASA. (One version was designed to patch up in orbit debris damage to the Space Shuttle fleet.) The latest version on the material now serves in the turbine of the LEAP engine, which GE makes in a joint venture with Snecma (Safran). CMCs can perform at temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit – in hotter conditions than any alloy can handle. One version of the LEAP engine is currently being tested at GE’s testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. Commercial service is planned for 2016 and airlines have already ordered more than 5,400 LEAP engines valued over $70 billion.

Say Carlson: “The U.S. needs to be shaping paradigm-shifting technology to avoid having others shape it for us.”

Thinking About the Box: Breakthrough CNG System Could Launch Energy Revolution

The history of Marshall in East Texas is rich with transportation lore. Several major stagecoach lines stopped there in the 1840s. The crucial Texas & Pacific Railway line originated in Marshall, tied it to major American cities and earned the town its Gateway to Texas sobriquet. But Marshall is still breaking new ground. Last fall the city opened a next-generation compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling station. The system, which was developed by GE, is the first node in a CNG network that could revolutionize transportation and travel, and set the U.S. on a road to energy independence.

GE’s Ujjwal Kumar calls this network the Internet of energy. “You cannot create an internet if you custom-design everything site by site,” says Kumar, who works as the general manager for unconventional solutions at GE Oil & Gas. “You need a common protocol, a standard technology.” He says that in the past truck and car fleet operators built their own CNG filling stations from scratch with off-the-shelf gas compressors, dispensers and other equipment. It wasn’t an ideal solution. “If you want to grow, you need to get scale in quality and reliability,” he says.

GE calls this new standard technology CNG In A Box*. The plug-and-play system, which is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio, holds a motor, compressor, gas drier, gas cooler and other gear inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. It can be connected to municipal or transit gas pipelines pretty much anywhere. The box links to a GE Wayne dispenser that can pump out natural gas at a fast, six-gallons-per-minute clip. “All of these pieces of the technology are preconfigured and factory tested by GE,” Kumar says.

Today, there are seven units operating in the U.S., including the filling station in Marshall, and GE is delivering a new system for installation almost every week. China’s Endurance Industry recently signed an agreement to purchase 260 units and Canada’s Chelsea Natural Gas just ordered 20. GE sales teams have received calls from customers in the U.S., Europe, Russia and Israel.

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Ozinga Energy is a fourth-generation family business based in Chicago, Illinois. The company is using three CNG in A Box systems to power its fleet of several dozen new CNG concrete mixers. Ozinga’s CNG concrete trucks and the fueling systems have been financed by GE Capital. Credit: Ozinga Energy
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The plug-and-play system, which is part of GE’s ecomagination portfolio, holds a motor, compressor, gas drier, gas cooler and other gear inside a standard 20-foot shipping container. It can be connected to municipal or transit gas pipelines pretty much anywhere. The box connects to a GE Wayne dispenser that can pump out natural gas at a fast, six-gallons-per-minute clip. Credit: Ozinga Energy
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“All of these pieces of the technology are preconfigured and factory tested by GE,” says GE’s Ujjwal Kumar. “This is the beauty of the Internet of energy,” he says. “Because we can work at scale, the technology becomes predictable and makes it easier to order parts or secure financing and insurance.” Credit: Ozinga Energy
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CNG could reduce carbon emissions by a quarter per vehicle and fuel costs by as much as 40 percent, compared with gasoline. Credit: Ozinga Energy
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This is just the beginning of a larger movement, Kumar says. The technology could create a new ecosystem where other companies from banks to maintenance shops can play. “This is the beauty of the Internet of energy,” he says. “Because we can work at scale, the technology becomes predictable and makes it easier to order parts or secure financing and insurance.”

The benefits could be huge. CNG could reduce carbon emissions by a quarter per vehicle and fuel costs by as much as 40 percent, compared with gasoline. Even better, the energy expert and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Amory B. Lovins says that if we switched all heavy trucks from diesel to natural gas, it would be “the most important non-automotive way to get the nation off oil by 2050.”

*CNG in A Box is a registered trademark of GE Oil & Gas.

A Leaner, Cleaner Machine: Engineers Cut 4,000 Pounds of Exhaust-Scrubbing Gear from New Locomotive

Over the last decade the U.S. government has enacted a number of rules designed to reduce smog and air pollution in cities and towns. Many of the regulations focus on two culprits: nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate matter (PM) like tiny chemical, metal, soil and dust particles.

The most stringent of these rules, called Tier 4 emission standards, will kick in for locomotives on January 1, 2015. They will slash particulates by 70 percent and NOx by 76 percent from the current Tier 3 emission levels for every new engine. “The demands on the industry have grown exponentially,” says Len Baran, heavy-haul platform leader at the locomotive maker GE Transportation. GE has built the world's first locomotive that solves the problem in an ingenious way.

Since 2005, GE has invested $600 million in the development of a Tier 4 locomotive that eliminates the need for any NOx and PM exhaust “after-treatment,” the catch-all industry term for filters, converters and similar technology.

The Tier 4 standards, which were announced in 2004, put industry engineers in a tight spot. One of the easiest ways out involved adding a large filter and a 4,000-pound catalytic converter, as heavy as a passenger car, on top of the engine. The converter uses many gallons of urea, a chemical compound first discovered in urine, to break up NOx in diesel exhaust into nitrogen and water.

But the solution has a big downside. The converter hampers access to the engine and adds extra maintenance. Railroads would also have to invest an estimated $1.5 billion in urea distribution infrastructure. “We took a different track,” Baran says. “We decided to solve the problem inside the engine and cut out the need for urea, converters and PM filters altogether.”

Since 2005, GE has invested $600 million in the development of a Tier 4 locomotive that eliminates the need for any NOx and PM exhaust “after-treatment,” the catch-all industry term for filters, converters and similar technology. Engineers from GE Transportation and GE Global Research spent several years in the lab, building and experimenting with a new engine design. The team built a single cylinder engine for testing, gathered detailed measurements of the exhaust and plugged the information into custom software models designed to simulate a full-scale engine. “We realized early on that we had to keep the temperature inside the cylinder at an optimal level to reduce NOx and PM,” Baran says. “So we devised an ingenious system that pipes in some of the hot exhaust gas. That’s the simple explanation.”

Today, GE’s new Tier 4 Evolution Series Advance Power 4, which is ecomagination certified, locomotive is the only engine that meets the EPA's Tier 4 requirements without any after-treatment technology. GE has already built and started testing two of the locomotives on a track in Pennsylvania. Another set of Tier 4 diesel engines is going through endurance tests inside a GE locomotive plant.

“We don’t need a filter and we don’t need a converter,” Baran says. “It’s a game-changer.”

Postcards from Tatooine: Modified GE Jet Engines Give Algeria’s Desert Province Power Lift

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This image shows a typical GE mobile power plant installation. This Algerian plant includes four TM2500 aeroderivative turbines. They can generate more than 70 megawatts of power.
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The modified jet engine peeks from behind the mobile trailer's open door.
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Two shrink-wrapped mobile plants just arrived from Houston. Each contains the modified jet engine, controls package, exhaust stack and other parts.
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Each mobile plant fits on the back of a tractor trailer.
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The desert at dawn.
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Workers in the control room are calibrating controls, and testing and checking the equipment.
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Every morning workers attend a “safety tail gate” meeting where managers go over safety procedures and discuss any issues with the equipment.
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Before power reaches consumers, workers need to assemble transformers, put up transmission lines and connect the mobile electricity generators to the grid.
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The GE team at an installation in Algeria.
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The Tatooine-like landscape of the M’Sila province in northern Algeria provides the country's Mediterranean coast with a rugged bulwark against the encroaching Sahara desert. Despite the arid conditions (M'Sila is quite close to the original Star Wars set), the province is home to 1 million people who need electricity, especially in the summer when temperatures easily top 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Earlier this year, GE started shipping to the area mobile power plants designed to “fast-track” power production and make sure that locals have enough power to turn on their ACs and meet peak electricity demand. Each of the mobile power plants rides on a trailer and holds a modified jet engine that burns natural gas to generate power. The engines are manufactured by GE workers in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the power plants are assembled for shipping by a GE team in Houston, Texas.

The technology, which GE calls aeroderivatives, serves on all continents, with the exception of Antarctica. GE usually sends the plants to their destination by ship, but they can also fit inside huge AN-124 transport planes for immediate delivery. If gas pipelines, concrete support pads and other infrastructure are already in place, workers can get the plants running in just 60 days.

Algeria’s Société Algérienne de Production de l’Electricité (SPE Spa), an affiliate Algeria’s national electricity and gas company Sonelgaz, has ordered 24 such plants from GE. They will generate a combined 538 megawatts of electricity.

The mobile plants are part of a $2.7 billion power generation technology deal announced last Monday. Taken together, the technology, which includes massive gas turbines for co-generation power plants as well as the aeroderivatives, will supply Algeria with nine gigawatts of electricity.

Built For Speed: F1 Team Ushers In NextGen Race Car Using Advanced GE Tech

In Ron Howard’s brand new Formula 1 car-racing movie Rush, the legendary driver Niki Lauda gives his rival James Hunt a sage piece of advice: “To be a champion, it takes more than just being quick.”

Scientists working at GE Global Research (GRC) agree with that sentiment. Their advances in big data analytics and materials science developed in GE labs in the U.S., Germany and India are helping Caterham F1 Team’s Formula 1 race cars perform better. “It’s a win-win partnership for both of us,” says Matt Nielsen, GRC’s principal scientist for controls, electronics, and signal processing. “They are on a very short technology development cycle, often only two weeks between races. We learn how to apply our technology in that time-scale.”

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Formula1B.jpg"]
The Caterham team is solving problems very similar to what GE engineers do every day. “It’s all very analogous to what we do in the field with gas turbines, aircraft engines and the Industrial Internet,” Nielsen says.
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The GE team is focusing on four areas to help the team’s cars get around the course more quickly: big data analytics, fiber-optic sensing, composites manufacturing, and heat management.
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Each Caterham car has some 500 sensors buried inside its wheels, engine, gearbox, chassis and elsewhere. Together they generate up to 1,000 data points per second.
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“These cars are roving sensor platforms traveling at 200 mph,” says Nielsen, who grew up as an open-wheel racing fan.
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The GE team is focusing on four areas to help the team’s cars get around the course more quickly: big data analytics, fiber-optic sensing, composites manufacturing, and heat management.

Each Caterham car has some 500 sensors buried inside its wheels, engine, gearbox, chassis and elsewhere. Together they generate up to 1,000 data points per second. “These cars are roving sensor platforms traveling at 200 mph,” says Nielsen, who grew up as an open-wheel racing fan.

The gigabytes of data travel to Caterham’s UK headquarters for analysis, where team engineers combine it with information generated during the development cycle, wind tunnel tests and even from a driver simulation system. “We were shocked by how much data they had,” Nielsen says. “We are helping them look at how they store, assemble and make connections between pieces of data, and pull out those nuggets that help them fine-tune their cars. The analytics developed by GE have the potential to cut Caterham’s data processing by half.

Some of the data may soon come from advanced fiber-optic sensors. The GE team built them to accurately measure the downforce on the front wing below the car’s nose. They believe that the embedded instruments can improve the wing’s design and help the vehicle go faster around turns.

Lauda and Hunt were racing in metal cars, but today’s cars are built mainly from carbon composites. The few exceptions include the engine, the drivetrain, and pipes. GE materials scientists are helping the racing team replace aluminum cooling tubes with composites and reduce weight. “Every ounce adds up,” Nielsen says. “We’ve made good progress and are working to transfer the manufacturing process to them.”

Starting with the 2014 season, F1 will enter a new, super-efficient era. The engines will still generate up to 700 horsepower, but they will be capped at 1.6 liters of displacement and use around a third less fuel than today. To do so, engines will come equipped with advanced turbochargers and energy recovery systems, which will boost performance. GE engineers are helping Caterham design sophisticated intercoolers that reduce the temperature of the air the turbocharger pumps into the engine. “You don’t want a lot of pressure drop, but you want the air as cool as possible,” Nielsen says. “We know a lot about heat transfer and are using that to help build analysis tools for Caterham.”

Nielsen says that the Caterham team is solving problems very similar to what GE engineers do every day. For that reason, there are a number of places where collaboration could lead to insights beyond just F1 racing cars. “It’s all very analogous to what we do in the field with gas turbines, aircraft engines and the Industrial Internet,” he says.

It Takes a City: Healthcare Partnership in Cincinnati Offers Solution to Rising Medical Costs

The U.S. spends nearly a fifth of its GDP on healthcare, more than any other developed nation. Chronic disease, aging population, childhood obesity and other causes put the system under severe pressure and threaten America’s ability to compete on global markets.

GE, like most U.S. employers, is in the same boat. The company's U.S. employee benefit programs support more than 500,000 workers, their spouses and children, and retirees. With GE's U.S. healthcare costs at more than $2 billion annually, company executives realized they needed solutions to manage the growth.

One focused on changes at the community level. They started in Cincinnati, Ohio, the base of GE Aviation and home for thousands of GE workers. The broad plan included a coalition of large employers, hospitals, insurers, city government and patients. They would be working together to improve healthcare quality in the city, expand access to care and lower costs over the long run.

"If we don't take accountability ourselves for figuring this out, we're part of the problem," Sue Siegel, CEO of GE Ventures, told The New York Times. "We have to be involved in the solution. We can't just wait for someone to tell us that it is going to be fixed."



Starting in February 2010, the partners zeroed in on five areas: primary care, information technology, quality improvement, consumer engagement, and payment innovation. They began collecting metrics like healthcare improvement, outcomes and costs, and tracking goals for the metropolitan area’s 2.2 million residents.

At the same time, the local community invested in primary care, digital records, and customer engagement through websites like yourhealthmatters.org to improve healthcare efficiency and generate better value.

The power of this partnership in Cincinnati can be seen in the results that are coming in, and they encouraging (see report). Cincinnati has become one of the nation’s most medically wired communities. The U.S. government selected the city to participate in the prestigious Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative organized by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. This project alone has the potential to bring $100 million in incentive payments to primary care doctors who improve the coordination of care for their patients.

An analysis of GE’s own medical claims data is also beginning to show gains from such coordinated care. An innovative healthcare model, called Investment in Patient-Centered Medical Homes, helps primary care physicians coordinate treatment for their patients. It has reduced ER visits and hospital admissions. Similarly, quality improvement efforts focused on pediatric asthma and diabetes are beginning to show fewer complications and hospital admissions, and better care. "Early results are promising: patients enrolled in medical homes had 3.5 percent fewer visits to the emergency room and 14 percent fewer hospital admissions over the four years from 2008 through 2012," the Times story said.

The early results were strong enough that GE expanded its community-level efforts to two additional cities in 2012—Erie, Pennsylvania, and Louisville, Kentucky. The company has also partnered with the Clinton Foundation’s new Health Matters Initiative to help build healthy communities nationally.

“Health is an investment we must protect and that means we all have to do things differently,” said Siegel. “Collaborations like this one in Ohio are important to driving sustainable transformation that yields better health and healthcare value for our businesses, our employees, their families and communities.”

#GEInstaWalk: GE Loosed Instagrammers at an Engine Testing Facility, See What Happened

The words jet engine testing call to mind the heady days of Chuck Yeager pulling Mach 2.44 over the California desert. These days, the testing tends more toward the high-tech than cowboy, but it’s no less awesome a site to behold. That’s why GE recently loosed a gaggle of Instagram photographers on GE Aviation’s Peebles Test Operation in Ohio to document the space age facilities. We called it the first ever #GEInstaWalk.



The six winning photographers were plucked from the photo-sharing network to join a crack team of GE’s regular Instagram contributors at the test facility. There, they photographed the black “turbulence control structure” that looks part Death Star, part Buckyball. They also got shots of engines like the ultraquiet and efficient GEnx and the LEAP-1A, a next-gen power plant equipped with carbon-fiber composite blades, 3D-printed fuel nozzles and parts made from ceramic matrix composites.

See the slideshow of some of the day’s best captures below.

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Lindsay Crowder framed the turbulence control structure against the wispy clouds in the sky.
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Chris Ozer captured the play of light on the honeycomb-like matrix of the turbulence control structure.
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Dan Cole got this shot of a test stand at the Peebles facility.
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Adam Senatori got up close and personal with the fan blades of a GEnx engine.
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Tyson Edwards found fans at the Peebles Test Operation.
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Christian Cannon snapped Tyson Edwards jumping over a 55-foot wind tunnel at GE’s Peebles Test Operation.
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Tyson Edwards captured this feat of strength.
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  A Chris Ozer shot from inside the test facility.
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Great Lakes Mystery: Wreck Hunter Hopes GE CT Scanner Can Identify 300-Year Old Ship

It was a good day for sailing on Sept. 18, 1679, when the French ship Le Griffon left an island harbor in Lake Michigan’s Green Bay. A light wind blew from the west, perfect conditions for the vessel’s voyage to Niagara Falls to pick up supplies.

But good weather in the morning, as any visitor to the Great Lakes knows, can turn foul before breakfast ends. A storm came up on the water the day after the 45-ton, three-masted ship set sail. Neither it nor its crew of six was ever seen again.

That is until now, if explorers who have been searching for Le Griffon, also known as the Griffin, for years are correct. They used the latest GE medical imaging technology to shed new light, or rather X-rays, on the 300-year old mystery.

In 2001, diver and history enthusiast Steve Libert found a strange piece of timber sticking out of the muddy bottom of Lake Michigan. Libert says he’s been obsessed with studying and locating the ship since he was a schoolboy in Ohio. He suspected the wood might be the Griffon’s bowsprit, the pole that extends out from the front of a sailing ship. “There was no question about it—that this was definitely man-made,” he says. “I’ve been researching this ship since I was 14. I’m 99.9 percent sure it’s the Griffon.”

Steve Libert used a GE CT scanner to count the tree rings inside a 600-pound beam recovered the bottom of Lake Michigan. He hopes the rings will help him tie the beam to the Griffon which disappeared 300 years ago. Credit: Steve Libert/Great Lakes Exploration

He was hoping that the 20-ft.-long oak pole would be just the highest piece of the shipwreck that was buried in the mud beneath it, but divers who excavated the lake bottom found nothing else below it. “My hypothesis is that the bowsprit became dislodged from the ship as it was sinking and the storm moved the rest of it somewhere else,” Libert says.

But whether the wood is actually a piece of a ship is still in question, as is how old it is. Several different groups of laboratory scientists and archaeologists are analyzing it to determine its provenance.

Libert’s team sent samples for radiocarbon dating, a method of determining organic matter’s age range by measuring the decay of carbon inside it. So far, the tests have not ruled out the possibility that the wood was cut in the late 17th century. “Apparently the Griffon was built in AD 1679,” wrote Darden Hood, the director of carbon dating lab Beta Analytic, which analyzed one sample several years ago. “The results do support an AD 1679 time of death of the wood used in such a construction. However, it is clear that other lines of evidence are needed to exclude temporal possibilities extending all the way to AD 1950.”

In 2001, diver and history enthusiast Steve Libert found a strange piece of timber sticking out of the muddy bottom of Lake Michigan. Libert says he’s been obsessed with studying and locating the Griffon since he was a schoolboy in Ohio. Credit: Steve Libert/Great Lakes Exploration

Libert says the most recent round of radiocarbon dating by Beta Analytic came back on Sept. 23. Their analysis, he says, revealed with 95 percent probability that the beam came from a tree cut down sometime between 1680 and 1740.

In June, they recovered the whole 600-pound object from the lake’s icy waters. To get more data about the tree from which it was shaped, they needed to peer inside at the wood’s annual rings. But to count the rings, they would have needed to either drill into the pole to pull out a core or cut out a slice. Either method would have damaged the object. Instead, they called Carol Griggs at Cornell University’s tree-ring laboratory to solicit ideas. She offered an innovative potential solution: put the artifact into a medical CT scanner. Such devices use X-rays to take successive cross-sectional pictures, or virtual slices, of the body.

So they called Otsego Memorial Hospital in Gaylord, Mich., near their storage site to see if the facility had any equipment that would be up to the task. They were lucky. Hospital officials said they had a CT scanner made by GE that might be able to do the job.

In late August, Libert and five other crew members carried the timber into the hospital and loaded it into the GE LightSpeed VCT* XT 64-slice CT scanner. In seconds, the scans started popping up on a monitor. Radiology technicians whose jobs typically had them interacting with patients, counted 29 clearly visible rings. “The images from the CT scan were nothing less than fantastic!” said Libert. “I attribute this to an excellent piece of well-designed, technological equipment along with a highly trained group of professionals at the hospital.”

The scans were sent to Cornell University’s tree-ring laboratory so specialists there could match the rings to others in their database. This might yield a better estimate of the tree’s age when it was felled. Libert expects Cornell’s analysis to be completed soon, though he cautioned that deterioration at the bottom of Lake Michigan might have damaged the beam beyond reasonable classification. “The machine was able to image 29 rings, which might not be enough,” he says. “Still, the tree-ring lab was extremely excited the scanner could even image that much.”

Not everyone is convinced the object was part of the Griffon, even if it turns out to be the right age. An Associated Press story said that Michigan's state archaeologist contends it could be a stake from a "pound net," a type of fishing gear used for centuries in which fishermen strung nets between poles rammed into the lake’s bottom.

But contrary hypotheses won’t deter Libert, he says. If the age-detecting techniques they’re using determine that the artifact is from the late 17th century, his crew will venture back out to the vicinity of where they found it to continue their search for the rest of the vessel.

“If it turns out that this is the bowsprit of the Griffon, I believe the rest of the wreck is within four or five football fields of it,” Libert says. “I expect to find that ship intact.”

*Trademark of the General Electric Co.

Blades and Bones: The Many Faces of 3D Printing

GE started testing its first jet engine that contains 3D printed parts last week. A big step for advanced manufacturing, for sure, but just the beginning of the 3D printing revolution. Like ordinary machining, 3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, spans a wide gamut of technologies for many different applications, from rapid prototyping to producing designs previously impossible to make.

Engineers and designers are not the only ones excited about the technology. A recent Citi Research report noted that GE has been investing for a decade in additive manufacturing and “has developed a strength in high-end metals and ceramics. This has been commercialized in fuel nozzles in aviation but is expected to have many additional applications across GE industrial businesses.” Take a look at our slideshow:

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This lattice cube, which was made from titanium on an electron beam melting machine (EBM), resembles a bone chip. There is a good reason. The "organic" design makes it about one third of the weight of a solid cube while maintaining the solid’s compression strength. This technology could deliver huge material savings and weight reduction.
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This hand was 3D printed on an Objet Connex500 machine that can use two different resins at the same time. In this example, designers used a hard resin for the bones and a soft one for the flesh. GE is not moving into making body parts, yet, but 3D printing is helping engineers rapidly prototype and test their designs, and speed up parts development.
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This example of a high-pressure turbine blade was made from a cobalt-chrome alloy on another type of 3D printer, the direct metal laser melting (DMLM) machine. This machine uses lasers to melt layers of metal powder into the final shape. The blade contains intricate cooling channels that would be otherwise difficult to manufacture. It is a good example of the new freedoms enjoyed by designers using additive manufacturing to make metal parts.
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Like the turbine blade, this replica of a fuel nozzle was printed on a DMLM machine from a cobalt-chrome alloy. The method can achieve intricate internal geometries shown on the next slide.
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This image shows the internal geometries of the fuel nozzle that would be difficult to make using conventional manufacturing methods. A part this complex would normally require the welding together of over 20 different components. An additive manufacturing machine can build it as one piece.
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This porous titanium sphere was made on an EBM machine. It illustrates the power of the additive technology. Before 3D printing came along, engineers were not able to cast or manufacture such complex shapes.
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Tall Order: 11-Foot Jet Engine - World's Largest - Will Power Lufthansa's New Aircraft Fleet

Lufthansa became the first airline to select for its fleet Boeing's next-generation 777X aircraft powered by GE’s advanced GE9X engines. The engines for the 34 planes are valued at more than $2.5 billion. The GE9X will use high-tech parts and materials like 3D printed fuel nozzles, fourth-generation composite blades, and special ceramic matrix composites.

The GE9X builds on more than two decades of GE research and development that involved hundreds of engineers and scientists exploring the boundaries of materials science, thermodynamics, and jet engine design. It will usher in a new generation of the GE90 engine family.

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Want a lift? The GE9X is the offspring of the world's most powerful engine, the GE90, in the picture above.
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“The GE90 777 essentially opened the globe up to incredibly efficient twin-powered wide-body planes,” says David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation.
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In 1990, GE launched the GE90, the world’s largest and most powerful jet engine for Boeing’s 777 aircraft. Until then, airlines could not fly wide-body planes across oceans and continents with just two engines under the wings. “The GE90 777 essentially opened the globe up to incredibly efficient twin-powered wide-body planes,” says David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation.

The engine used fan blades made from a carbon fiber composite rather than metal for the first time in aviation history. “The design team woke up every morning thinking about the GE90 and went to bed every night thinking about the GE90 because it was such a radical change in design,” Joyce says. “No other jet engine manufacturer has composite fan blades in service today.”

The material allowed engineers to reduce the number of blades and build a larger engine. The fan’s 10-foot 8-inch diameter increased the amount of air bypassing the engine, improved thrust and boosted efficiency. “No one had thought about this, or if they had, it was not within the art of possibilities for most design teams,” Joyce says. (The blade that the GE team came up with was so comely that New York’s Museum of Modern Art included it in its design collection.)

But GE engineers kept improving on the blade. They reduced the number of blades from 22 inside the GE90-115, to 18 in the follow-up engine, the GEnx, developed for the Dreamliner. Joyce says that GE will be on its fourth-generation of carbon fiber blades by the time the GE9X enters service later in this decade. It will have only 16 blades even though their 11-foot diameter will be larger than the GE 90 fan. These innovations combined with a new composite fan case and lightweight ceramic materials inside the engine will shave hundreds of pounds from the machine, and improve its fuel efficiency.

The ceramics, for example, were developed by scientists at GE Aviation and GE Global Research. They can perform at temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit – in hotter conditions than any alloy can handle. Engineers call the material ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). Like their carbon-fiber cousins, they are much lighter than the metal equivalent. CMC parts in the combustor and turbine will allow the GE9X to burn less fuel than the GE90-115B, which is already part of GE's ecomagination portfolio. “There’s not a component in that engine that does not come through some form of very advanced technology,” Joyce says.

Engineers have been testing the materials and technologies for the new engine for several years. They ran fan-blade tests at the ITP engine-testing facility in the United Kingdom. This month they will assess the engine’s high-pressure compressor at a GE Oil & Gas facility in Massa, Italy.

GE has delivered more than 1,500 GE90 engines to Boeing. The aircraft maker is now using the GE90-115B engine exclusively to power the latest generation of its 777 planes, the 777-300ER, the 777-200LR and also 777 freighters. The Boeing 777 is the world’s most successful twin-engine, long-haul airplane.