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.”

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.”

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.”

#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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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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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Additive1.jpg"]
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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The Matchmaker: Workhorse GE Locomotive is Helping Amtrak Hire Vets

The GE Genesis locomotive wearing veteran colors is pulling Amtrak trains throughout the U.S.

When Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman painted one of his locomotives red, white and blue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, the reason was a mix gratitude and self-interest. Boardman served in Vietnam and the new design was meant to honor America’s veterans. But he also wanted vets to come work for him. “The leadership, reliability and high-tech skills veterans bring to the job are a great resource to the operation of America’s railroad,” he says.

Amtrak expects to hire more than 3,000 workers over the next year, and the company has set a goal to make vets a quarter of all new hires by 2015.

Amtrak's vet locomotive is the workhorse P42 Genesis engine manufactured by GE. It pulled into Los Angeles this morning for a Hiring our Heroes jobs fair organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Amtrak is one of many companies courting veterans. GE, for example, hired 1,000 vets in 2012 and the company is actively seeking and training more. Last fall, GE and partners Alcoa, Boeing and Lockheed launched the Get Skills to Work coalition designed to fill vets’ skills gaps and provide employers with the right tools to recruit hire, and mentor veterans. The program, which also includes the Gary Sinise Foundation, has a goal to reach 100,000 veterans by 2015. GE started hiring the program’s first graduates this spring.

According to estimates, there are 1.9 million unemployed veterans in the U.S. At the same time, there are some 600,000 open advanced manufacturing jobs across America. More than 82 percent of manufacturers report they cannot find people with the right skills to fill openings.

“The need is obvious,” said Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO. “The challenge is matching their skills to our job openings and getting them the right jobs.”

GE Started Testing Next-Gen Jet Engine with 3D Printed Parts

Engineers at GE’s Peebles Test Operation in Ohio have started testing one of the world’s most advanced jet engines designed for next-generation passenger aircraft.

The engine, called LEAP-1A, contains 3D printed fuel nozzles, fourth-generation carbon-fiber composite blades, and parts made from ceramic matrix composites. The ceramics can operate at temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit where most alloys grow soft. They are also two-thirds lighter than the metal equivalent. “In the past five years, we have completed thousands of hours of component testing leading up to this day,” said Chaker Chahrour, executive vice president of CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Snecma (Safran )that is developing the engine. “Everything we have seen tells us the LEAP engine is going to deliver all we promised, and much more. Now, we get to put it through its paces in the most comprehensive test program we have ever undertaken.”

The engine fired for the first time on Sept. 4, two days ahead of schedule. After a series of break-in runs, the engine was operating smoothly and had reached full take-off thrust.

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The LEAP-1A on a test stand in Peebles. The engine fired for the first time on Sept. 4, two days ahead of schedule. After a series of break-in runs, the engine was operating smoothly and had reached full take-off thrust.
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The black “turbulence control structure” is a high-tech wind shelter for testing jet engines. Its purpose is to smooth out the flow of air into a jet engine that is being tested. This is helpful during simulations of engine distress, including variations in fuel flow and “deterioration” of the engine compressor and turbine. Engineers also use it to reduce variation in thrust and fuel consumption data.The dome is made from an array of 300 flat aluminum honeycombs and perforated stainless steel plate panels of varying sizes.
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The tests will evaluate various engine systems and operability. Chahrour says that when he and his team are done in 2016, they will have gone through 60 different engine builds for both ground and flight testing, and simulated more than 15 years or airline service. (A build is defined as the same basic engine that has been disassembled for inspection and then rebuilt to continue testing. It may or may not include new hardware.)

The team will be testing the engine at the Peebles site for the next several weeks. In early 2014, the second build of the engine will begin icing tests at GE’s testing site in Winnipeg, Canada, where winter temperatures dip regularly below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

CFM is developing three versions of the LEAP engine for three different single-aisle aircraft. The LEAP-1A engine will serve on Airbus A320neo planes. The LEAP-1B will power Boeing 737MAX jets, and the LEAP-1C will propel COMAC’s C919 aircraft.

CFM executives said that the LEAP, which is part of GE's ecomagination portfolio, would improve fuel consumption by 15 percent and deliver an equivalent reduction in CO2 emissions compared to today’s best CFM engine. It will also bring “dramatic reductions” in engine noise and emissions, the company said in a news release.

CFM has received orders for 5,446 LEAP engines valued over $70 billion. They include orders from carriers like AirAsia, Southwest, Virgin America, Lion Air, Pegasus, Qantas, WestJet and dozens of other airlines around the world.

The testing program for the LEAP-1A engine will culminate in engine certification in 2015. The first entry into commercial service on the Airbus A320neo is planned for 2016.

Falling For You: GE Launched World’s Longest Apple Drop on Vine to Celebrate #GravityDay

GE and hundreds of tech and science fans came together over the weekend to celebrate #GravityDay on Sunday, Sept. 8 (9.8 m/s2 roughly equals gravitational acceleration). GE's pitch was the Apple Drop, a nod to Sir Isaac Newton and an attempt to create the longest user-generated Vine chain ever experienced on the social media platform. The Vine activation lasted from Friday Sept. 6 through the end of Gravity Day.

Users dropped apples from the top of the screen, caught them, and then dropped them again through the bottom of the screen. The results appear as if a single apple is falling through all participating vines as you scroll through the app.

Here’s the inaugural Apple Drop entry.

Mind Meld: Where Edison Meets the Wright Brothers

Thomas Edison was not the first engineer to build a working light bulb and the Wright brothers were not the first aviators to fly an aircraft. But like Edison, they took an abstract idea and made it practical.

Edison came up with a carbon filament that made bulbs shine reliably for days. Orville and Wilbur Wright completed the first self-powered flight and invented the airplane. Their achievement was so momentous that in 1939 FDR chose to celebrate August 19, Orville Wright’s birthday, as National Aviation Day.

The innovative legacy of the Wrights and Edison now resonates inside a single company. GE, established by Edison, built the first American jet engine. Today, GE makes the most powerful jet engines from futuristic materials, designs technologies that make flying cheaper and more efficient, and helps planes land at some of the most forbidding airports. Take a look at our slideshow.

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GE’s latest jet engine, LEAP, uses parts made from revolutionary materials called ceramic matrix composites, or CMCs. The ceramic can handle the punishing forces inside a jet engine at temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Since CMCs are also a third lighter than conventional alloys now used to make jet engine parts, they can shave hundreds of pounds from a jet engine and reduce fuel burn. GE developed the LEAP in a joint venture with France’s Snecma called CFM International.
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They called them the Hush-Hush Boys. In 1942, a top-secret group of GE engineers build the first American jet engine.
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Unlike any other jet engine in history, the LEAP engine also uses metal fuel nozzles “printed” by lasers by adding one layer on top of another. CFM has already received orders for more than 4,500 LEAP engines. The company plans to start ground testing the first full LEAP engine for Airbus A320neo aircraft this September.
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The GE90-115B jet engine is the most powerful jet engine ever built. At a 2002 test stand, it generated 127,900 pounds of thrust, earning it an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records (that’s more than the combined total horsepower of the Titanic and the Redstone rocket that took Alan Shepard to space). One of the engine’s blades made from advanced carbon fiber composites is now part of Architecture and Design Collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
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The GE90’s successor, the GEnx, was developed for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner aircraft. A GEnx-powered Dreamliner now holds world speed and distance records on a round-the-world flight for its weight class. This GEnx engine is powering through a water ingestion test at GE Aviation’s testing site in Peebles, Ohio.
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When New Zealand’s Queenstown airport switched on a new data-based GE navigation system last year, the technology cut monthly cumulative delays from 2,400 minutes to just 200 minutes. Less holding pattern meant fewer gallons of fuel burned and lower emissions. The system, called Required Navigation Performance or RNP, relies on GPS signals rather than ground based beacons. It is an example of how airlines and airports can tap the power of data to improve operations. James Fallows, an aviation reporter and China expert, wrote that before RNP, much of western China was “effectively beyond the range of reliable air travel.” GE has recently launched GE Flight Quest and challenged data enthusiasts and coders to use big data sets like flight routes, weather, plane and airport system data, and design a solution that would maximize flight economics by telling the pilot the optimal route to fly a plane.
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Running a leaner, more efficient airline does not have to involve spending capital on the latest, most efficient planes. A little bit of jet engine brain surgery can do the job. GE engineers have developed a brainy software system called Fuel and Carbon Solutions that crunches aircraft data, from jet engine performance, fuel burn and plane location to information coming from digital flight data recorders. GE estimates that the system can cut an airline’s fuel bill by up to 3 percent. That may not seem like much, but consider fuel costs can reach between 30 to 44 percent of an airline’s operating expenses. China Airlines and other oerators have signed up to use the system.
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Applied Science: Futuristic Microfactories Bring Next-Gen Jet Engines to Life

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So you’ve developed a revolutionary new material that could take hundreds of pounds off a jet engine and save millions in costs, but now what? “We invent these fantastic new technologies and processes, but then we have to navigate the challenges that come with effectively scaling them up for production,” says Robert McEwan, general manager for new product introduction at GE Aviation.

That’s why McEwan’s business together with GE Global Research set up a cluster of manufacturing boot camps designed to get innovations in shape for mass production. They call them “microfactories” and the facilities are already working on technologies ranging from advanced composites to robotics and 3-D printing. “The purpose of these microfactories is to bridge the gap between investment and production,” McEwan says. “When we plan to introduce a new technology into our engines, we need to make sure that we have the right equipment, the right processes and the right people to produce it, scale it, and make it mature.”

Tom Mantkowski leads the turbine airfoil microfactory in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his team developed a new way to drill a complex system of cooling holes in the twisting blades of jet engine turbines. The team designed the process, started running samples of 150 parts, and over several months brought “first-time yield” to 90 percent. At that point they moved the manufacturing equipment to the production plant. “We have a lot of front end capabilities that manufacturing shops do not,” Mantkowski says. “When we’re working on new technologies, we can bridge the gap between development and manufacturing.”

Brains for Planes: Etihad Taps Big Data to Keep Planes on Time

Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates’ flag carrier, will tap the Industrial Internet and use sophisticated software to harvest and analyze gigabytes of data generated by hundreds of sensors working inside its planes. The tools will allow Etihad to monitor planes in real time, reduce fuel costs, manage plane maintenance, and even spot problems before they happen.

The Industrial Internet is a robust network of computers, machines and sensor that combines connectivity with advanced software analytics and low-cost sensing. It has the potential to save customers ranging from airlines to hospitals and oil companies billions by making them more efficient.

Werner Rothenbaecher, Etihad’s senior vice president for technical issues, said that “the advanced capabilities of the service" will help Etihad "to make rapid and informed decisions in relation to maintenance, while gaining technology leadership in diagnostics and prognostics health monitoring. With Taleris’ prognostics, we will be able to predict future faults and take proactive measures which result in less unscheduled disruptions to our global operations.”

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 aircraft is clearly the airline’s biggest and most important asset,” said Andy Heather, vice president of engineering at Taleris. “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.”

Big data and the Industrial Internet will help keep Etihad Airways planes on time.

Heather said Taleris’s approach to optimizing aircraft systems and predicting maintenance takes advantage of the hundreds of sensors already present inside new planes. “Most modern aircraft already have many thousands of parameters flowing around their digital networks,” he said. “Our goal is to integrate the aircraft data in a broader environment with the rest of the airline IT.”

The analytical tools from Taleris will help Etihad’s fleet of advanced Boeing and Airbus planes keep their engines and other mechanical systems in the best working order, burn fuel more efficiently, and repair parts before they fail. The system will also help Etihad hold down maintenance cost, reduce operational downtime and lower the chance for passengers to encounter unexpected equipment maintenance-related delays.

The FAA estimates that delays cost airlines more than $8.3 billion in 2010. But Taleris president and CEO Norm Baker said 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.”

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.

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.”

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.

What Packs More Power than the Titanic and a Space Rocket Combined? Boeing Picks Massive GE Jet Engines for Next-Gen 777 Plane

Boeing chose GE as the engine partner for developing the next-generation 777 plane.
“This decision to work with GE going forward reflects the best match to the development program, schedule and airplane performance," said Bob Feldmann, vice president and general manager for the 777X development project at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “We are studying airplane improvements that will extend today's 777 efficiencies and reliability for the next two decades or longer, and the engines are a significant part of that effort. Our focus is on providing the most competitive offering to our customers in the large twin aisle market.”

The GE90 would turn the Titanic into a speedboat.

The Boeing 777 is the world's most successful twin-engine, long-haul airplane. The latest generation of planes, the 777-300ER, the 777-200LR and also 777 freighters, use exclusively the GE90-115B engine, which reigns as the world’s most powerful jet engine. The engine generated 127,900 pounds of thrust at a GE test stand in Peebles, Ohio, in 2002. That’s more than the combined total horsepower of the Titanic (46,000 pounds) and the Redstone rocket (76,000 pounds) that took the first American, Alan Shepard, to space. The feat earned the engine a spot in the Guinness World Records book.

The engine is also a study in innovation and applied design. The sinuous, efficient curves of the engine’s carbon fiber composite fan blades that pull thousands of pounds of air per second inside the engine are so graceful that New York’s Museum of Modern Art picked one for its Architecture and Design Collection.

GE has delivered more than 1,000 GE90 engines to Boeing. GE engineers have started working on an engine study, called GE9X, for the next-generation GE90 engine, which is designed specifically for the 777X plane. “The GE9X engine study is focused on improvements in fuel burn, noise and emission over the current GE90-115B engine while maintaining comparable reliability and maintenance cost,” said Bill Millhaem, general manager of the GE90 program at GE Aviation.

The engine core will have parts manufactured from a revolutionary new material called ceramic matrix composite. The material can work at temperatures as high as 2,400 F, higher than any advanced alloy. These innovations will help GE improve fuel efficiency by 10 percent, compared to today’s GE90 engines, saving airlines millions.

Printing Jet Engines: GE Aviation Acquires Two 3-D Printing Pioneers

Last October, Michael Idelchik, vice president for advanced technologies at GE Global Research, pointed to 3-D printing called it “the next manufacturing revolution.” Idelchik said that 3-D printing, also described as additive manufacturing, “had the potential to fundamentally disrupt” how we make complex machines and transform industries. “The potential impact of additive manufacturing is huge,” Idelchik said. The technology “prints” intricate designs by adding thin layers of material on top of each other. “Four decades from now, we could be printing an entire engine this way,” says Michael Idelchik.

Beyond Testing: 3-D printers can manufacture parts from plastics and metals, just like these printed test samples of aircraft parts.

A full engine is still a tall order but printed jet engine parts are already here. The newest GE jet engines like the CFM LEAP, which GE Aviation makes in a joint venture with France’s Snecma, will have printed combustion system components and other parts inside.

This is only the beginning. GE Aviation just announced that it acquired two U.S. additive manufacturers who have developed advanced technologies for rapid 3-D prototyping and production. “Morris Technologies and Rapid Quality Manufacturing are parts of our investment in emerging manufacturing technologies,” said Colleen Athans, vice president and general manager of GE Aviation’s supply chain division. “Our ability to develop state of the art manufacturing processes for emerging materials and complex design geometry is critical to our future. We are so fortunate to have Morris Technologies and Rapid Quality Manufacturing just minutes from our headquarters. We know them well.”

Both companies are located in Cincinnati, close to GE Aviation’s plants. Morris Technologies and Rapid Quality Manufacturing operate 21 additive manufacturing machines. This makes them possibly the largest additive manufacturers in the world. The companies have been making prototype components for GE jet engines for several years. They have also made parts for GE Global Research and GE Power System. The price of the acquisitions has not been disclosed.
Tag: GE Aviation, GE Global Research

Taking Off: How GE Invented the Modern Jet Engine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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