Cold War Kids Meet Again: EU Clears Czech-Made GE Turboprop For Popular Commuter Plane

In the 1960s, the Soviet airline Aeroflot was shopping for a tough new commuter plane that could service far flung airports in the frozen Taiga as well as the sun-baked Kazakh desert. With few options on the market, Aeroflot bosses commissioned Czech aviation engineers, long regarded among the best in the business, to build an aircraft that met their needs and an engine to go with it. The plane, the L-410 Turbolet, and the engine have been in production since, flying passengers and cargo across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

The plane has gone through numerous redesigns over the years, but things were getting rusty under the engine hood. When GE acquired the engine factory in 2008, the engine was surviving on legacy and badly needed an upgrade. GE dispatched to Prague a team of American engineers to work with the Czechs. Together they applied advanced aerodynamic design, materials and manufacturing techniques to slim down the engine, add power, and cut fuel burn.



The Turbolet and the new engine, which GE calls H80, can now fly together again. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certified the combo in April and one of the first GE-powered Turbolets landed in Prague this week. The certificate also gives GE an entry into the turboprop commuter market.

GE plans to produce more than 70 of the new engines this year. Besides the Turbolet, the engines are already flying on the American Thrush 510G crop dusters.

A Physicist Walks Into a Bar...: How a Random Encounter Helped Track Down Elusive Pain

A decade ago, Yale physicist Kevin Koch was “just hitting the bars” when he struck a random conversation with a fellow graduate student at Gryphon's Pub, a Yale student hangout. As such affairs go, they were soon discussing neuroscience, consciousness, brain imaging and other heady matters. “This student had just come from a lecture by Robert Shulman, a biophysicist and the founder of Yale’s Magnetic Resonance Research Center (MRRC), an important research hub for using magnetic resonance to study the brain,” Koch says. Shulman and his faculty were looking for physics graduate students to work on technical problems in magnetic resonance, and Koch, who spent the previous summer working at GE Healthcare’s imaging lab in Waukesha, was intrigued. “I’ve always been interested in the application of physics in medicine,” Koch says. “I went in, sat down with Shulman, and got hooked. MRI is the forefront of applied physics in medical imaging. There are so many interesting applications.”

Clear Vision: Kevin Koch’s math models helped untangle the effects of magnetic field distortions caused by metal implants.

Koch, 35, is now pursuing those applications at GE Healthcare and his research is already helping doctors like Hollis Potter from Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. Potter spent 15 years trying to understand elusive pain coming from her patients’ hips, knees and other implants. She began to crack the riddle after Koch’s research at GE untangled the effects of magnetic field distortions caused by metal implants. “I pushed implant designs through mathematical modeling software that I developed in the lab at Yale,” Koch says. “The models allowed us to better understand the impact of the magnetic field distortions.”

Koch’s collaboration with Potter, along with technical partners at Stanford University, allowed GE to develop an innovative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system called MAVRIC SL. It allows doctors to see damaged tissue around MR Conditional implants, but also nerve impingement, the integrity of joints and bones fortified with stainless plates and screws, and other medical issues.

When Koch joined the Yale research lab, he knew little about software, but a chance encounter helped out again. “One of my roommates at Yale was a theoretical physicist and a programmer, and he helped get me off the ground,” Koch says. He then taught himself to program in C, a popular general-purpose programming language, and MATLAB, a code used to manipulate numbers and MRI data.

GE hired Koch right after he got his Yale PhD. Potter arranged for Koch to meet with orthopedic surgeons and their patients to “understand how frustrated they were.”

“I didn’t want an ivory tower physicist,” she says. Therefore, “he was thrown full thrust into the clinical translation of the problem. He understood how important it was.”

Koch began by tracking the spatial variation of magnetic fields generated by the implants. “It became apparent that we did not want to follow a conventional x-y-z Cartesian imaging coordinate system anymore,” Koch says. “We collect an arbitrary collection of 3-D volumes and stack them up like a bunch of blocks. We just have to make sure than we add them up properly.”

Koch’s models did not solve the problem, but their results pointed him in the right direction. “Eventually, our group at GE was able to develop a novel MRI acquisition concept that addressed the distortions predicted by the models,” he says.

It took Potter and Koch just over a year to build a working prototype. They took their first image in 2010. Potter says that her hospital has already imaged 3,000 patients with MAVRIC SL. The system does not require a new machine. Hospitals only need to upload new software on existing MRI scanners.

“It gives people an answer for their pain,” Potter said. “From an emotional standpoint of dealing with illness, that’s huge.”

Brains for Cranes: GE Tech Gives Lift to Giant Shipyard Cranes

The Goliath gantry crane at China’s Dalian shipyard is so large that the old Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands would fit snugly within its 4,000-ton frame. But unlike its biblical namesake, this behemoth, which is 650 feet wide and 320 feet high, is no pushover.

The crane’s two trolleys riding along the cross beam, or gantry, will soon start using a laser-guided “anti-collision” system developed by GE Power Conversion. The system will allow Dalian to precisely monitor the trolleys’ position, let them scoot along the gantry simultaneously, and improve crane efficiency. Advanced GE electrical drives inside the trolleys will convert gravitational energy into electricity when lowering heavy loads and feed it back into the system. Sophisticated power management technology will distribute the power to motors and gears lifting loads to save electricity. “Few people know that GE builds brains for big cranes,” says Lutz Steinhaus, global sales and engineering application leader at GE Power Conversion.

Need a Lift?: “Few people know that GE builds brains for big cranes,” says GE Power Conversion's Lutz Steinhaus

Dalian will be using the crane to build next generation LNG tankers and container vessels. “Working together with GE helps us continually push the boundaries of shipbuilding,” says Gao Guo Chun, project manager at Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd.

Steinhaus says that the innovative drives can regenerate 80 percent of the energy required to lower a load and make it available for lifting. “We’ve developed an energy balancing system that allows the operator to use as little power as possible,” he says. “One trolley lowering a load can provide power to the other.”

GE engineers also built in an active energy management system that allows the operator to keep track of all the crane’s functions and data through simplified status, diagnostics and fault detection.

Similar GE systems are already powering 20 other cranes around the world, including three at Dalian.

It's in the Blood: Microbubbles Help Biologist Jason Castle See Inside the Body

A few weeks after GE biologist Jason Castle signed up for EMT training in upstate New York, his crew got an emergency call from the family of an elderly man. The sick man was lying in bed and breathing heavily. He was weak and dizzy, but his symptoms were vague. Castle felt frustrated. “You go in with a blank slate as to what the problem could be, you check the vitals and if you suspect a heart attack, you take him to the hospital for tests,” he says. “If this were the case, between transport, CT imaging, and stent placement an extremely critical one to two hours would have elapsed,” Castle says.

Back in his lab at GE Global Research (GRC) in nearby Niskayuna, Castle got quickly to work. Castle, 35, is an ultrasound researcher experimenting with “microbubbles,” tiny gas-filled spheres the size of red bloods cells that can flow through the bloodstream, reflect sound waves and help flesh out otherwise grainy ultrasound pictures. “They are exactly what they sound like, just little bubbles filled with very dense gas that acts as a contrast agent,” he says. “When you inject these microbubbles, it’s like turning on the light inside the heart.”

“When you inject these microbubbles, it’s like turning on the light inside the heart,” says GE biologist Jason Castle.

Castle is using microbubbles to develop ultrasound technology that could ride inside the ambulance and help medical staff diagnose patients on the spot, potentially saving lives. “Anywhere blood flows, these microbubbles can travel,” he says. “If you are in a car accident and you have internal bleeding, we could tell right away, identify what organs have been injured and where the blood is pooling. You could start these types of tests as soon as the ambulance shows up.”

EMTs could deliver microbubbles in the vein through an ordinary IV injection. The bubbles dissolve minutes after the test and the gas leave the body in the breath.

As impressive as it sounds, Castle and a team of GRC scientists are already thinking about the next step. They are experimenting with using microbubbles as tiny missiles to ferry drugs, antibodies and even DNA payload to tumors, clogged arteries, and whole organs like the liver. When they reach the target, doctors could change the acoustic setting of the ultrasound and burst the bubbles with sound waves. “You pop the bubble and the drug goes wherever you want it to go,” Castle says. “You could administer a fraction of a chemotherapy dose and reduce the side effects. It could have a huge potential for the quality of life of cancer patients.”

Sitting in the back of an ambulance, Castle is thinking about a time in the near future when doctors could use microbubbles to image a patient’s heart and deliver anticlotting drugs at the same time. “Becoming an EMT as well as a biologist working to improve ultrasound gives you a chance to really see both fields,” he says. “As an EMT you see the current standards of care, how things are done, and how they could be done better.”




Disclaimer: Technology in development that represents ongoing research and development efforts. These technologies are not products and may never become products. Not for sale. Not CE marked. Not cleared, approved or authorized by the U.S. FDA or other national regulatory authorities for commercial availability.

The X Factor: The GEnx is Turning 10

Tom Brisken smiles when he sees his jet engine roar down the runway, but it is the smile of a long-distance runner at the end of a marathon. Brisken spent the last decade developing GE’s most advanced large jet engine, the GEnx, as the general manager in charge of large aircraft customer strategies at GE Aviation, and the path to technological breakthrough wasn’t always clear. “There for a while we were biting our nails,” he says.

Today, ten years after the launch of the GEnx program, the engine has beaten expectations and set new records. New data from customers, for example, made Boeing improve fuel burn estimates for the GEnx-2B, which powers the 747-8 cargo planes, potentially saving airlines millions. For Brisken, who retired last year, that’s “like heaven.”

No Pain, No Gain: This GEnx engine must prove its mettle in sub-zero temperatures at GE's testing facility outside Winnipeg, Canada.

The program gained momentum in April 2004 when Boeing selected the GEnx engine for the 787 Dreamliner. It was an exciting moment, but it sent expectations sky high. Eager to save weight and improve efficiency, GE engineers took the existing state-of-the-art engine, the record-setting GE90, and put it on a crash diet. They eagerly jettisoned composite fan blades and airfoils – so many, that the engine’s performance suffered. “We just went too far,” Brisken says of the strategy. The team had to add some weight back to meet the targets.

Engineers then had to remodel the engine’s lean combustion system to smooth out pressure flows. “It was like going from a four-speed transmission to a continuous transmission,” Brisken says. The hard work shows in the performance data: The GEnx is up to 15 percent more efficient than comparable GE engines. It also generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions.

The engine has already entered the record books. In 2011, a GEnx-1B-powered Dreamliner flew halfway around the world on a tank of gas, then finished the job on the next tank. The journey set a weight-class distance record for the 10,337-nautical mile first leg and a record for quickest around the world flight, an astonishing 42 hours and 27 minutes.

Both the larger GEnx-1B and the slightly smaller 2B engine, which powers the 747-8, are also whisper quiet. Concerned residents reportedly called the San Bernadino Port Authority to complain that Boeing was flying the new 747-8 freighter over their homes with the engines off. They could be forgiven. Pilots have been known to glance at their fuel gauges to make sure the engines are still running.

What’s next? GE engineers are already thinking about using revolutionary new materials called ceramic matrix composites, or CMCs, inside the engines. CMCs can handle temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit and the punishing forces inside the engines. They are also a third lighter than conventional alloys now used to make jet engine parts.

Say Brisken: “We drain the lake on every piece of technology we have and use it to our advantage.”

Talking Trash: One Man’s Garbage, Another Man’s Megawatts

Parts of continental Europe can’t get enough of it. Norwegians are begging their neighbors for more. They’ve even considered shipping it from the U.S.

What they want is garbage, simple household trash and solid town waste. From Sweden to Spain, innovative power producers have learned to make electricity from waste. The movement is now spreading west and picking up steam in the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Green Waste Energy (GWE), for example, will soon hitch its innovative waste-to-gas technology to powerful GE gas engines from the Jenbacher family. They will power a new electricity plant in Theddingworth in central England and similar projects may soon move ahead in other parts of the world.

Got Garbage?: GE and Green Waste Energy developed technology that turns household trash into electricity.

GWE calls the garbage-gulping technology Advanced Recycling and Energy Conversion. One plant can take 1,000 tons of household trash per day, about 8 percent of what New Yorkers generate daily, and turn it into 600 megawatts of electricity. That's enough to power 24,000 U.S. homes.

Unlike the European incinerators, however, GWE’s technology does not burn the garbage. James Burchetta, the CEO and founder of GWE, says that the process starts with the unsorted, or “black bag,” garbage being fed into a pressure cooker called an autoclave in batches of 29 tons. Workers sort out the recyclables and turn the remaining cellulose-based feedstock into synthetic gas, or syngas, through a process called pyrolysis. “We not only meet the UK and EU [environmental] standards, we eat them for lunch,” Burchetta says.

Syngas has high energy content and burns efficiently in the sturdy Jenbacher J620 engines. “GE gas engines are known worldwide as the leaders in syngas engines,” says Richard Bingham, the chief technology officer of Prestige Thermal Equipment, which developed the garbage-gasification process and licenses the technology through a joint venture with GWE. “We’re not going to take our technology that we’re proud of and put it at risk by using it with another engine.”

GWE is now in talks to build similar facilities around the world. “The world is looking for an advanced thermal conversion technology,” Burchetta says.

Here's to making garbage a hot commodity.

DIY Cancer Test: Cancer Scare Pushed GE Physicist to Develop Her Own Screening Method

It was a moment that many of us fear. A few years ago Ileana Hancu went for a routine physical exam and came back with troubling news. Her doctor thought that she felt a lump in her breast. What followed was an odyssey through the achievements of modern medicine, from mammography, to ultrasound and near biopsy. “But then the biopsy doctor decided that he could not see anything that he could biopsy,” Hancu says. She went for yet another test, an MRI exam, which gave her doctor enough information to conclude that no further screening was necessary. “In my case it was nothing, it was just a scare that took a month,” Hancu says. “But it made me realize that the way things are right now, even though we have so many imaging tools, we are not as good as we could be.”

Hancu, who is a physicist by training and MRI researcher at GE Global Research (GRC), couldn’t let her experience go. She went into her lab and designed an imaging solution that could one day save women like her from a similar ordeal. “I want the doctor to be able to look at all the images from an examination, and know for sure that everything is all right, or whether there is cancer,” she says. "Nobody needs or wants uncertainty at the end of a test."

Quality Control: “I measure success by making an impact on somebody’s life,” says Ileana Hancu.

Hancu’s research could be a boon for women in groups for whom mammograms can often be inconclusive, such as those with dense breasts. Her goal is to help eliminate the uncertainties when this group is screened. “You want to find out the answer about the positive or negative at that moment in time,” she says.

Hancu grew up in Bucharest, Romania, in a scientific family. Her father was a computer programmer, her mother was chemist, and Hancu enrolled at the university to study optics. “There probably wasn’t a single MRI machine in the whole country at that point in time,” she laughs. After graduation in 1996, she moved to study physics the University of Pittsburgh and discovered magnetic resonance. A few years later, she had a doctorate in the esoteric field. “That’s why I ended up at the GRC,” she says. “There are few places in the world that could use that kind of expertise.”

Hancu was in the middle of MRI research when her cancer scare struck. MRI had been used in the clinic for breast cancer diagnosis, but standard MRI images produced too many false positives, or lesions, which turned out to be benign at biopsy.

A new MRI-based method meant to clarify the picture, called diffusion-weighted imaging, has “bounced around the literature for the past few years,” Hancu says. “But the diffusion-weighted images were kind of lousy,” she says. They were like a screenshot from a TV with a bad antenna, fuzzy and distorted. A doctor could not truly read them and use them to decide the fate of a patient.

Hancu has started experimenting with methods that would increase the MRI signal and the spatial resolution of the images so that she could see even smaller tumors. One of her approaches involves building the MRI equivalent of a high-resolution camera.

The research work has already earned Hancu and her collaborator, Prof. Robert Lenkinski from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. They plan to test their technology on patients in a clinical trial to help further evaluate its use in breast cancer diagnosis.

Hancu says that learning is not an academic exercise for her. “If you end up developing an imaging technique that will help save people from having biopsies, if you can develop a technique that can tell you with certitude whether you have cancer or not, I think that’s the final measure of success,” Hancu says.

“I measure success by making an impact on somebody’s life.”

Hollis Potter and the Pursuit of Pain: Dr. Potter and a GE Physicist Probe the Magnetic Field to Find Where It Hurts

Some people are searching for happiness, radiologist Dr. Hollis Potter is looking for pain. Potter runs the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) division and imaging research at Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. She has spent the last 15 years tracking down pain gnawing at her patients’ metal hips, knees and other implants. Then a partnership with a young physicist from GE Healthcare has helped her to crack the riddle.

“The worst thing is to have pain somewhere in your body and have no answer for it,” Potter says. In the 1990s, Potter started using MRI to get a better look at ailing joints only to face a new problem: metal joints, plates, and screws produced magnetic artifacts, which obscured a critical part of the image where the implant meets the tissue. She experimented with magnetic field settings, pushing the MRI machine to its limit. “Every single day I would look at images side by side and scratch my head trying to figure out why Mrs. Jones had knee pain,” Potter says. “But the machine can only go so far before it cries uncle and says ‘Sorry, Hollis, I can’t do any more for you.’”

Dr. Hollis Potter with GE’s Kevin Koch: “I didn’t want an ivory tower physicist being locked up in Waukesha,” says Dr. Potter (right).

As the population ages, the problem could crop up more and more. Recent studies estimated that there are more than 1 million knee and hip replacements surgeries performed in the U.S. and 250,000 in Europe.

In 2008, Potter decided that she needed a physicist to make progress. She gathered her 10 years of patient data and started knocking on industry doors. “I went to MRI manufacturers, went through my data, and showed [them] what we had found,” Potter says. “GE was willing to step up to the plate, roll up their sleeves, and try to solve this problem through imaging.”

Potter’s luck was about to turn. GE Healthcare in Waukesha, Wisconsin, had just hired Kevin Koch, a young physicist with a doctorate from Yale. “It was methods that I developed during my Ph.D. that allowed me to model the magnetic field distortions that the metals were introducing,” Koch says.

Potter was skeptical, at first. “I didn’t want an ivory tower physicist being locked up in Waukesha,” she said. “I asked him to come out and he spent a lot of time going through my data. I had him meet with orthopedic surgeons and understand how frustrated they are. I had him meet with the patients.”

Koch sympathized with the doctor. “She was very patient in the beginning,” he says. “I am sure that she wanted results and I was showing her physics explaining where the image artifacts were coming from.”

Before long, the team got their first break and filed their first patent. Koch wrote software that could predict distortions in the magnetic field and used it to correct the distorted images. But the approached turned out to be a blind alley. “It was not robust enough,” Koch says. “It was a little bit deflating.”

But then, about nine months into their research, Koch hit on another solution. He found a new way to capture the magnetic resonance signal. Rather than building the image from two-dimensional slices, kind of like reassembling a salami, Koch started adding up an arbitrary collection of 3-D blocks, or bins. The method, a set of software instructions that can work on any MRI machine, allowed the team to take the same image at multiple frequencies and fix the distortions. “It really opened up our eyes,” Potter says.

Potter says that the system, which GE calls MAVRIC SL, allows her to see damaged tissue around “MR conditional implants,” but also nerve impingement, the integrity of joints and bones fortified with stainless plates and screws, and other medical issues. “People with a recalled implant can come in and find out if their implant is at risk,” Potter says. “Whether they are symptomatic or not, they are worried about what’s happening inside their body.”

Potter says that her hospital has already imaged 3,000 patients with MAVRIC SL. She said that her work with Koch was “a perfect example of a collaboration between an academic site and an industry.”

“It gives people an answer for their pain,” Potter said. “From an emotional standpoint of dealing with illness, that’s huge.”

Now You See Me: This 65-year old patient developed severe pain lasting several months after a total hip replacement three years earlier. Unlike X-ray and conventional MRI images, MAVRIC SL showed clear evidence of an abnormal response indicative of an adverse tissue reaction. The patient was indicated for a revision surgery. Credit: Courtesy of Hospital for Special Surgery *

*These images were generated using the MAVRIC SL software feature and are representative of the quality of images that users should expect to generate. However, GE Healthcare is not always able to confirm whether the images are of MR Conditional implants or whether scanning was in accordance with the implant's instructions for use. MAVRIC SL should only be used with MR Conditional implants and within the MR conditions specified for those implants.

Laser Vision: Trifon Laskaris’ MRI Research Helped Revolutionize Brain Surgery, Medical Imaging

In 1990, Harvard radiologist and former brain surgeon Dr. Ferenc Jolesz developed a medical procedure that involved guiding a laser beam to a brain tumor through a fiber optic strand inserted in a patient’s skull. Jolesz would use the beam’s intense heat to kill it. But there was a problem. When he turned on the heat, he could not see exactly where it was going. “It was like trying to evaporate an apple seed inside a whole apple without cutting it,” says the Budapest-born Jolesz. “The patient has a small hole in the skull, but you don’t see anything when the laser is on. If you don’t deliver enough heat, you will only dent the seed. If you deliver too much, you’ll make a big hole in the apple. To treat safely and effectively, you have to see what the laser is doing.”

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Signa1.jpg"]
Trifon Laskaris’ double-donut design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, says Dr. Jolesz.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Signa2.jpg"]
Trifon Laskaris’ double-donut design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, says Dr. Jolesz.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Signa3.jpg"]
Trifon Laskaris’ double-donut design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, says Dr. Jolesz.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Signa4.jpg"]
Trifon Laskaris’ double-donut design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, says Dr. Jolesz.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Signa5.jpg"]
Trifon Laskaris’ double-donut design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, says Dr. Jolesz.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Signa6.jpg"]
Trifon Laskaris’ double-donut design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, says Dr. Jolesz.
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Jolesz thought that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can see inside the body and also detect heat, could help. With the right machine he would be able to visualize temperature changes during the surgery and monitor the tumor treatment with heat. But he ran into another problem: such a machine did not exist.

Trifon Laskaris holds 200 patents. He helped revolutionize medical imaging.

A GE executive introduced Jolesz to GE engineer and medical imaging pioneer Trifon Laskaris. “Trifon designed a magnetic resonance machine (MRI) that was open vertically,with two magnetic rings like a double donut,” Jolesz says “We could image the patient and operate at the same time. Not only laser procedures could be done, but all types of open surgeries.”

Jolesz says that more than two decades later, Laskaris’ design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery. Jolesz and other doctors at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital have used it for more than 3,500 surgeries, including 1,400 craniotomies, brain biopsies and other neurosurgery procedures. Today, intraoperative MRI is widely used in neurosurgery and in other procedures.

Laskaris received a dozen patents for his work on the Brigham machine. He now holds 200 U.S. patents, a feat matched only by a handful of GE inventors. “Trifon’s work speaks for itself,” says Mark Little, head of GE Global Research and the company’s chief technology officer. “Without his decades of dedicated research into superconducting magnets, MRI technology would not be where it is today, a mainstay of hospitals around the world.”

Laskaris says that he liked playing with gadgets since he was a small boy growing up in Athens, Greece. “My father was a high school teacher and my mother was a seamstress,” he says. “One day her sewing machine broke down. I was just six years old, but I connected the pulleys, installed the little motor and put in the switches.”

Laskaris studied engineering at the National University of Athens. In the 1966, he answered a call from GE and came to the U.S. “At the time there was a big U.S. space program and many American engineers were going to NASA,” Laskaris says. “That drained a lot of talent from the industry.”

At GE, Laskaris started developing software simulating cooling flows inside massive power generators for nuclear power plants. But he quickly moved to GE Global Research (GRC) and started working on magnets and superconductivity, a physical phenomenon that drops electrical resistance to zero in extremely cold metals. “When you power up a supercooled magnet, it can produce the same magnetic field for a thousand years with no more power required. You can do so many cool things with it,” he laughs.

Things like building an MRI machine. In 1983, a team of GRC engineers developed the world’s first full-body MRI, and Laskaris helped design the machine’s 1.5 tesla magnet. “We started by imaging grapefruits,” he says. But his magnet has since become the industry standard. Today, there are some 22,000 1.5 tesla MRI machines working around the world, generating 9,000 medical images every hour, or 80 million scans per year.

But Laskaris, now 69 years old, is pushing on. Liquid helium used to cool down the magnets is becoming scarce and his MR team is working on designs that need just a fraction of the fluid. His first machine 30 years ago used 5,000 liters of helium. His latest design in development is projected to need no more than 10.

Re-Joyce: GE to Launch Breakthrough Pump Jet for Offshore Vessels

Ever since Ulysses plunged his oar in the wine-dark Aegean Sea, mariners have been looking for an efficient way to move a ship. Greek galleys anticipated Robert Fulton’s paddle wheel, which was put out of business by the screw propeller. But GE engineers now built and patented a new machine that attaches to the bottom of a ship like a jet engine to an aircraft wing, and looks like one too. The device, called the Inovelis pump jet, can swivel 360 degrees around its axis and push the ship in any direction without a rudder.

That’s Epic: Ships using GE pump jets will supply Petrobras oil and gas platforms located 180 miles off the coast of Brazil.

“We took the motor and put it in an external pod so it’s now in the water,” says Paul English, marine leader at GE Power Conversion. “Like a jet engine, it has fixed stator vanes inside a nozzle. The vanes straighten the water flow and guide it across the impeller blades. The blades get good water to attack and throw out the back. The result is a more efficient engine with better thrust.”

English says traditional screw propellers produce drag by “spilling” water around the screw tips to the front of the propeller. “When you look over the aft end of a ferry, you see a lot of churning water,” English says. “That’s basically wasted energy. Instead of pushing the water backwards, which is ideal, you are wasting energy on making it roll.” The stator and impeller, a fancy propeller enclosed in a nozzle, greatly reduce the churn.

The pod design also eliminates complicated transmission gears, cuts maintenance, and improves efficiency. “The shaft comes out the back end of the pod and straight into the impeller,” English says. “There are no gearbox [energy] losses at all. We’ve got rid of it.”

The pump jet was originally used in submarines, jet skis and high-speed surface vessels. But GE adapted the technology so that it can now power large supply ships.

GE workers are already making 17 pump jets for eight offshore platform supply vessels, including four ships that will supply deep sea oil and gas platforms operated by Petrobras and located some 180 miles of the coast of Brazil.

The new pods were designed for maximum speed of 16 knots, the oil and gas industry standard. They will work in combination with GE’s data-driven dynamic positioning system, which can keep ships virtually stationary on high seas without an anchor. “The ship algorithms gather location, water current speed and other data, and the computer calculates what thrusts it needs and its direction," English says. "The pods can turn around the vertical axis and hold the ship at a particular angle. You don’t need a rudder.”

If only Ulysses had a pump jet. He could set his ship on autopilot, his crew could skip the wax earplugs, and they could all enjoy the Siren song together.

Shazam for Aquaman: GE System Listens For Leaky Subsea Wells

Thousands of feet under the North Sea, an array of transformers, choke manifolds, pumps and valves buzz and whir in an improvised subsea symphony. They play for a 500-pound electronic ear whose design is a closely guarded trade secret.

The ear sends the sound through an umbilical cable to a seaborne control room filled with computers and engineers dissecting every stray whoosh and hiss. They are listening for oil leaks, odd vibrations, strange cracks and other signs of trouble. “An acoustic signature from a piece of equipment is like a fingerprint from a human,” says Fabian Dawson, sales manager from GE Measurement and Control. “No two leaks or pumps are going to sound the same.” Call it Shazam for the seabed.



Dawson says that the system holds a library more than 100,000 sounds. “We can filter out the background noise, like marine life, and listen only to the things that we want to,” Dawson says. He says that the system is 10,000 times more accurate than traditional “mass balance” systems that measure differences in the amount of oil and gas flowing through the pipes to detect leaks.

GE engineers designed the eardrum of the system, which looks like a giant birdcage, from special crystals that respond to sound wave vibrations and convert them into electricity. (Engineers call this effect “piezoelectricity.”) One ear can listen to sounds within a 1,600 foot radius.

But the system does more than that. An array of attached carbon rods can detect changes in the electromagnetic field generated by electrical cables, pumps, motors and other electrical equipment, and spot ground faults or defective isolation. “You can determine the rpm of a compressor from the acoustic signal, and then you can determine how hard it is working from the electrical signal,” Dawson says. “Taken together, they will tell you what the efficiency is.”

Workers deploy the cage by lowering it down the side of a ship from a crane. They use ROVs to secure it to a piece of subsea equipment or to the sea floor. “It’s a simple, X-marks-the-spot procedure,” Dawson says.

The system is already working at some 130 sites in the North Sea operated by Statoil, ENI, and Shell, and off the coast of Africa. GE has now introduced it to American customers at the 2013 Offshore Technology Conference held this week in Houston.

The system is using powerful software and algorithms to make sense of the sounds. But like an elusive remix you’ve heard at a party, phantom noise can still creep in. “You are looking at correlations between the pieces of the equipment emitting both the electrical and the acoustic signals, and sometimes there is a signature there that you can’t trace.” Dawson says. “We call them rogue sounds.”

When that happens, the GE teams goes straight to the source, the engineers who built the equipment. “They are the experts,” Dawson says. “They know what their machines should sound like. They can recognize the rogue harmonics.”

Digital Healing: How Big Data Helped Florida Hospital Get on Track

Like many American hospitals, the Aventura Hospital and Medical Center in Aventura, Florida, has long faced crowded waiting rooms and sought a more streamlined process for tracking empty beds and equipment. The key that cracked the problem was hiding inside a small plastic wristband the size of a digital watch. “I call it the diamond bracelet,” says charge nurse Cheryl Smith. "You don’t want to lose it."

The bands, which Aventura started handing out to patients in April 2012, contain a radio ID (RFID) and real-time-location (RTLS) tags that feed information to AgileTrac, a GE software system that pools and crunches gigabytes of patient and equipment data, and connect patients to doctors and machines in a hospital-sized Industrial Internet.



Each patient receives the wristband during admission. It automatically checks in as they arrive in their bed, travel around the hospital, and check out. The system does the same for the equipment. “I can locate a patient as soon as my patient receives a bed or is able to move out," nurse Smith says. "I know immediately regardless of where I am on the floor.”

The system allows staff to move patients in and out of their rooms as quickly as possible. The new system takes patients to a discharge lounge and to their families and caregivers in as fast as 30 minutes.

Aventura has calculated that AgileTrac cut more than 3,000 hours in discharge time at the 400-bed hospital over nine months. The system also dramatically freed up Aventura’s emergency room. “We are doing much better now than a year ago,” said Karen Bibbo, chief nursing officer at Aventura’s parent, HCA East Florida. She said that “not having AgileTrac would be like going from a computer back to the paper system.”

Keep Calm and Carry On: Data Driven GE Motors to Steer High-Tech Drillship through North Sea Storms

Days after the Queen Mary 2 left Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage to New York in April 2004, the world’s fastest and longest passenger ship hit a wall of fierce North Atlantic storms. Waves “as tall as a 20-story building” slammed against the upper decks and left ocean liner “bobbing through seas so rough that cabin doors slammed and drinks were flung from the well-polished bars,” according to The New York Times.

The Queen Mary 2 carried on through the bad weather, not unusual for this patch of the ocean, propelled, in part, by a pair of GE gas turbines and electrical motors. It arrived safely in New York just one day behind schedule.

Now a sister marine technology to the QM2 motors will labor in the same frigid waters. It will power a rugged, semi-submersible “ultra deep-water” drilling platform called the West Mira bound for North Sea swells off the coast Greenland and Canada.

Full Fathom Five: GE’s marine propulsion technology will help hold the West Mira deep sea drilling rig steady in frigid North Atlantic swells.

Like the QM2, the West Mira will be a record-breaking vessel. The deep water drilling company Seadrill, which ordered the rig, says the West Mira will be one of the most technically accomplished semi-submersible platforms in the world. It will be capable of drilling wells 40,000 feet deep beneath 10,000 feet of water.

Engineers from GE Power Conversion designed a system of connected power generators, drives, and propulsion systems that will listen to data from the rig’s electronic brain and positioning system, and hold the West Mira steady and on target.

Similar GE technology will also serve on a fleet of 22 new Petrobras drillships and rigs that will drill wells as deep as 7,000 feet below the sea 180 miles off the coast of Brazil. Those vessels will come with a crack GE “dynamic positioning system,” or DP, that can keep them within a 15-foot radius on the swells.

The DP applies sophisticated mathematical modeling software that blends location information with wind speed and ocean current data. The DP brain then calculates commands for a system of “intelligent” thrusters, propeller motors, electricity generators and other equipment similar to the West Mira gear that help keep the vessels in the right place.

“When you are drilling, you need to stay where you are,” says Paul English, marine vertical leader at GE’s Power Conversion business. “Coming off the wellhead because you’ve lost position could be a very expensive and very risky process.”

There Is an App For That: GE Links Apps, Battery, Turbine to Sell Wind Power to Order

Is a blustery day a boon for a wind farm or too much of a good thing? It depends, says Keith Longtin, general manager for wind products at GE’s renewable energy business. “The grid can’t always accept wind power as fast as it comes up,” Longtin says. “When it’s gusting, turbines turn their blades out of the wind and let some of the power pass through. That revenue is gone with the wind."

But Longtin and his team came up with a solution. They built the world’s first “intelligent” wind turbine with an integrated battery that can store excess power and release it when the wind dies down. The turbine, which is connected to the Industrial Internet, is loaded with sensors and powerful software. They gather and analyze turbine, weather, and grid data and forecast how much electricity the turbine will produce over the next hour.

“This is predictable power,” Longtin says. “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.”



The software package links the turbines to the Industrial Internet, a network connecting people, data and machines. The software comes with three key applications. They allow wind farm operators like Invenergy, the first customer using the new technology, to capture lost energy, make wind power output predictable, and help keep power pulsing through the grid at the same frequency. (This is important when several power plants are adding power to the grid at the same time.) “Utilities use gas turbines and other conventional generators to do this,” says Justin Sabrsula, an associate in GE’s renewable energy leadership program. "But the new wind farm system and sophisticated algorithms can now manage the same. It’s a revenue stream that wind customers can now capture.”

Invenergy, America’s largest independent wind power generation company, will deploy the first three GE 2.5-120 turbines equipped with the technology. (The numbers stand for 2.5 megawatts in output and 120 meters – the size of the London Eye - in rotor diameter), at the Goldthwaite Wind Energy farm in central Texas. Even without the battery, sensors and data already make this turbine 25 percent more efficient and 15 percent more productive than comparable GE models. Michael Polsky, Invenergy president and CEO, said that he picked the new system because innovation was “critical to our continued industry leadership.”

GE’s Longtin says that “wind power plays an increasingly important role in America’s energy mix.” He says that the “new marriage of battery storage and advanced software within a wind turbine allows forward-thinking wind energy producers like Invenergy to shift wind in its favor.”

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