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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tall Order: 11-Foot Jet Engine - World's Largest - Will Power Lufthansa's New Aircraft Fleet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voyager 1 Becomes First Man-Made Object to Leave Solar System; Probe Still Powered by GE Technology

A new research paper published today in the journal Science concluded that the Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first man-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. The journal says that “after long disagreements, that is now the consensus view of Voyager mission team leaders." The 35-year old spacecraft is still relying on GE technology, including command computers and power generators.

“I don’t know if it’s in the same league as landing on the moon, but it’s right up there — ‘Star Trek’ stuff, for sure,” said Donald A. Gurnett, a professor of physics at the University of Iowa and the co-author of the paper told the New York Times.

The spacecraft is now than 11.7 billion miles from home, almost 50,000 times farther than a trip to the moon. The Voyager 1 and its sibling the Voyager 2 launched in 1977. They were expected to last only a few years. “NASA considered everything past the Saturn encounter a bonus,” said Dr. Howard Butler, who ran GE’s Aerospace Electronic Systems Department.

GE engineers designed the Voyagers’ command computers directing the flight path and providing communication links with NASA Mission Control, as well as the probes’ power source called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These devices still remain in service and convert the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity for the spacecraft’s instruments, computers, radio and other systems.

Scientists have been speculating for several years about the exact timing spacecraft’s departure from the heliosphere, the limit of the particles thrown off by the sun. Last October, GE’s science and technology publication Txchnologist noted that since September 2012, the craft’s instruments have sensed a major, sustained drop in the low-energy charged particles released by the sun that reach it. The prediction was about five days off: the exact date of departure was Aug. 25, 2012.

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The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft launched in 1977. They are currently exploring the edge of the solar system. GE engineers designed the Voyagers’ command computers directing the flight path and providing communication links with NASA Mission Control. They also developed the probes’ electricity generator for the spacecraft’s instruments, computers, radio and other systems. The Voyagers have sent back detailed images of the solar system planets and their moons, confirmed the existence of Neptune’s rings, and gathered data about stars near the edges of the Milky Way.
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The Voyagers’s next mission is to explore the boundary of the Solar System. NASA now estimates that the probes will survive until 2025. The Voyagers also carry cargo designed to communicate a message from Earth to extraterrestrials. Each probe holds a special phonograph record, a 12-inch encoded gold-plated copper disc containing music, sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, from Bach and Chuck Berry to birds, heartbeat, and laughter.
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Connected: GE Software Gives New York City’s Largest Power Plant New Brain

A GE software and hardware upgrade has increased electricity output by 5 percent at TransCanada’s Ravenswood power plant in New York City, enough to power 10,000 New York households. Read the story behind the The Future is Now TV ad.

When Woody Allen declares his love for New York City on a bench under the Queensboro Bridge in the movie Manhattan, another New York mainstay makes a quiet cameo. Looming in the morning dusk just across the East River is the Ravenswood Generating Station, New York’s largest power plant with enough capacity to energize a fifth of the Big Apple.

New Yorkers have been using power generated by Ravenswood’s machinery, which includes a massive GE gas turbine, to meet peak demand during sweltering summer weather for decades. But last year the plant’s owner, TransCanada Corp., decided that it was time to add brains to Ravenswood’s brawn. “We wanted to bring cleaner, more efficient power generation to the marketplace,” says John McWilliams, vice president of energy operations at TransCanada.

Rather than spending hundreds of millions on new equipment, TransCanada used GE’s latest software, control system and combustion hardware to upgrade the existing turbine. Workers connected sensors to software and replaced key turbine parts with new components made from advanced materials developed for GE jet engines. “We were basically able to plug-and-play the latest and greatest technology into our existing unit,” says McWilliams. “GE has helped us find ways to be quite competitive with our infrastructure for much, much less.”

McWilliams says that in the past, control systems regulated power plants by looking at a few discrete data points such as firing temperatures, discharge pressures, the ambient temperature and humidity. “It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, you are in an acceptable range of operations,” McWilliams says. But the new technology, which GE calls “FlexEfficiency Advantage Advanced Gas Path,” is constantly gathering and analyzing data critical to performance of the turbine. A multitude of sensors is checking gas flows, temperatures, pressures, humidity and other variables, and feeds it back into the control system. The system is using the data to fine-tune the turbine to make sure that it is always running at its optimal level. “It’s real time and it’s interactive,” says McWilliams. “As things are changing, the control system is responding and always optimizing the unit.”

McWilliams says that the upgrade gives TransCanada “the flexibility to actually make some decisions on what we want to optimize. We can optimize for fuel efficiency, we can optimize for output, we can optimize for reduction of environmental emissions, or we can balance and see improvements of all three.”

The GE software installed at Ravenswood reaches beyond a single plant. It connects to the industrial Internet, a digital network that links people, data and machines, and taps pools of data generated by the entire GE turbine fleet running the same software. “We have access to the global view of power generation,” says McWilliams. “It allows us to improve or at least benchmark our performance. For example, if a power station in Pittsburgh is having an issue, we are able to quickly assess and analyze whether we are facing the same risks and then make some decisions to eliminate the problem before it occurs.”

McWilliams is quick to point out that the information provides a global perspective that is not specific to any turbine. “I can’t look across the East River at another New York plant and see how they are operating,” he says. “It’s not specific to that plant, it’s specific to that technology. We have service agreements in place, so much of the information is already at GE’s fingertips because they are directly connected to the units and receive the data continuously.”

On the hardware side, GE has supplied Ravenswood with new turbine blades, shrouds, and nozzles using advanced materials like single-crystal alloys and coatings originally developed for jet engines. They allow TransCanada engineers to fire the turbine at hotter temperatures, which make combustion more fuel efficient and power generation more productive.

As a result of the upgrade, Ravenswood is using less fuel to produce the same amount of power, making electricity cheaper and, relatively speaking, cleaner. TransCanada says that the upgrade has increased output by 5 percent. That's enough electricity to power 10,000 New York households. Says Adam Addesso, manager of engineering projects at Ravenswood: “These upgrades displace more expensive megawatts on the system. It’s a win for everybody, and those are rare.”

Go With the Flow: New Water-Based Battery Could Extend EV Range Beyond 240 Miles

Dr. Grigorii Soloveichik, a chemist at GE Global Research, combines the necessary ingredients for a water-based chemical reaction that generates electricity inside GE’s flow battery.

Imagine a brave new world where an affordable family EV sedan could cover the distance between New York City and Washington, D.C., on a single battery charge. It remains a fantasy, but perhaps not for too long. Scientists at GE Global Research and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are developing a new kind of water-based “flow” battery for electric vehicles that could achieve this driving range and go beyond it.

Grigorii Soloveichik, who leads the project at GRC and serves as director of the GE-led and Department of Energy-funded Energy Frontier Research Center, says that the batteries could be 75 percent cheaper than car batteries available on the market today and multiply current EV driving range. “The DOE wants a battery that can power a car for 240 miles,” he says. “We think we can exceed that goal.”

GE engineers say that unlike lithium-ion and other battery systems, the new technology will use water-based solutions of inorganic chemicals capable supplying high energy density by ferrying more than one electron at a time. They call the system a “flow” battery because the discharge and recharge occurs in electrochemical cells that stand apart from the energy storing tanks, which makes them safer. “We envision a flow battery with applications for both transportation and large-scale energy storage,” said Soloveichik. “Put simply, for EV’s, this represents a game-changing technology.”

The research is part of the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E RANGE program that seeks to develop game-changing electrochemical energy storage technologies. Engineers from the GRC and Berkeley Lab team says that they plant to develop a working prototype and “demonstrate feasibility” of the concept over the next year.

For comparison, the 2013 Nissan Leaf has an EPA-rated range of 75 miles. Tesla Motors' high-end 2013 Model S can reach 265 miles on a single charge. They both use lithium-ion batteries.

GE has a long history of EV research. A century ago, the company developed the first EV chargers. Most recently, GE engineers developed EV charging stations like the WattStation and sodium-based Durathon batteries, which are now part of the company's ecomagination portfolio.

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Heavy Lifting: GE Tech Powers World’s Largest Passenger Jet

Five years ago this month, the world’s largest passenger plane, the A380 double-decker, took off powered by four Engine Alliance jet engines. Engine Alliance is a joint venture between GE and Pratt & Whitney and the engines, called GP7200, combine the most advanced technology and materials from each of the company’s most successful jet engines, the GE90 and the PW4000.

The GP7200 engine has outperformed projections and delivered better performance, including three separate improvements on fuel efficiency that equal to savings of about $11 million over the life of a single A380. Engineers have also shaved 200 pounds from each engine, or 800 pounds per aircraft.

Emirates, Air France, Korean Air and other airlines are operating the engines on 49 double-deckers. Other GP7200 customers include Air Austral, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways. It total, airlines have picked the GP7200 engine to power 55 percent of all A380s. The manufacturer says that GP7200 engines have flown for more than 1.7 million hours and have a 99.9 percent departure reliability. Take a look at our A380 slideshow from the most recent Paris Air Show.

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Engineers shaved 200 pounds from each engine powering this A380, or 800 pounds per aircraft. Airbus' next-generation A350 plane is flying in the background. Credit: Adam Senatori
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The GP7200 is the quietest engine for the A380. It generates up to 81,500 pounds of thrust and has been tested up to 94,000 pounds of thrust. Credit: Adam Senatori
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Three separate fuel efficiency improvements mean that airlines can save about $11 million over the life of a single A380. Credit: Adam Senatori
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The GP7200 contains a “hot section” developed for the GE90. Credit: Adam Senatori
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GE Records: The Fastest, Farthest, First, and Most Powerful

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is the farthest man-made object from Earth, and, along with its sibling Voyager 2, is also the longest running NASA mission to date. Today, both are heading into the unknown: interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager spacecraft weren't expected to last this long. But it turns out, they were built to last. GE engineers designed the Voyagers’ command computers directing the flight path and providing communication links with NASA Mission Control. GE engineers also designed the spacecrafts’ power source, which is still converting heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity for the instruments, computers, radios, and other systems that allow them to beam data to Earth.

So what do the Voyagers have in common with the fastest train, the fastest ship and the most powerful jet engine? All were, at least partially, the products of GE engineering. Click through the slideshow to learn more about how GE helped reach new frontiers, break records, and solve some of the biggest challenges facing civilization.

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Breaking Speed Records in Trains: In 1966, railroad engineer Don Wetzel bought a pair of GE jet engines from a surplus Air Force bomber, bolted them to the roof of a stock commuter car, and took his contraption for a spin. On his second trip, the train sped along at 183, a North American rail speed record that still stands today.
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Powering the Fastest Ship: The world's fastest ship, the Francisco, is powered by two aircraft engine-based GE gas turbines driving a pair of water jets. Built at Australia’s Incat shipyard, it can reach speeds of 58.1 knots, or 67 miles an hour. It's also the first ferry to use liquified natural gas as a primary fuel, which places it among the most environmentally friendly and efficient ships in the world.
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Powering Systems in the Farthest Man-Made Object: Voyagers 1 and 2, headed to interstellar space, are to date the farthest objects built by people from Earth. Launched in 1977, they are still beaming data back to Earth today. GE engineers designed their command computers to direct the flight path and provide communication links with NASA Mission Control, as well as the probes’ power source called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs).
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Helping Put the First Man on the Moon: GE engineering helped put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Materials for their boots and helmet visors were designed by GE, as well as the Apollo program's radio command and guidance equipment. GE also engineers tested Apollo 11's command and lunar modules. Between 1961 and 1972, a total of 6,000 GE employees from 37 different operations helped NASA run the Apollo program and send 24 people to the moon and back.
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Pioneering the Use of Electronic Computers in Engineering: GE was the first company to use the world's first general purpose electronic computer (which was owned by the U.S. Military) to solve engineering problems. In 1954, GE bought its own computer, the Universal Automatic Computer I, to use on projects ranging from building the first industrial computerized payroll for GE Appliances to monitoring the liftoff of Apollo 11.
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Designing the Most Powerful Jet Engine: The GE90-115B jet engine is the most powerful jet engine. At a 2002 test stand, it generated 127,900 pounds of thrust, earning it a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records (that's more than the combined total horsepower of the Titanic and the Redstone rocket that took the first American to space). But the engine is still graceful enough that one of its blades was featured in New York's Museum of Modern Art for its Architecture and Design Collection.
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Tell Me What You Eat: Omnivorous Jenbacher Engines Use Whisky Mash, Manure, Old Lunches to Power Farms, Plants and Neighborhoods

What do you do when you run a growing business in a booming country in Africa and Asia but run out of electricity? What if your plant in America or in Germany gets slammed by a big storm or a heat wave and grid goes down? One answer is to build your own power plant.

This solution, which once looked expensive and preposterous, is not far-fetched at all. GE calls a network of small, independent power plants that can power farms, companies and even entire towns distributed power. The workhorse in GE’s distributed power portfolio is a family of Jenbacher gas engines. The engines often work with technology that turns a source of abundant waste including cheese whey, whisky mash, discarded school lunches, and sewage sludge into biogas. The Jenbachers then convert the biogas into electricity. Take a look at our infographic that explains the scope and spread of Jenbacher-powered power plants.

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GE Phone Home: GE Technology Helped Fly Humans to the Moon

NASA attached a GE jet engine to the Lunar Lander Test Vehicle to simulate the moon’s weaker gravity.

It was 44 years ago last Saturday that Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's boots touched the surface of the moon for the first time. Those soft boots and other systems supporting NASA’s Apollo missions relied on solid GE engineering.

GE scientists developed the silicon rubber for the moonwalking boots and the super-strong plastic for the visors of Armstrong's and Aldrin's helmets. They also built the Apollo program’s radio command and guidance equipment, and tested Apollo 11’s command and lunar modules. “With so much riding on this one, an extra effort was made to solve all the problems, no matter how insignificant,” said Earl Wayne Turner, GE test director for Apollo. “This one had to be absolutely clean.”

A total of 6,000 GE employees from 37 different operations helped NASA run the Apollo program between 1961 and 1972 and send 24 people to the moon and back.

GE and NASA keep working together. Carbon fiber blades developed for NASA’s “unducted turbofan” jet engine now serve on GE’s most advanced engines like the GEnx. Crews on the International Space Station are using a GE ultrasound device to study the impact of microgravity on Astronaut vision loss, which is still poorly understood. Take a look at our slideshow.

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 On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong went for a walk in boots made from GE silicone rubber.
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Leading up to liftoff, GE computers were continuously monitoring vital booster systems on Apollo 11’s huge Saturn rocket.
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GE engineers ground-tested Apollo 11’s command and lunar modules. NASA attached a GE jet engine to the Lunar Lander Test Vehicle to simulate the moon’s weaker gravity.
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GE’s ship-to-satellite system provided the first simultaneous live transmission of color TV images, newspaper copy and radio commentary from Apollo 11's splash-down and recovery in the Pacific.
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While the astronauts slept on the moon, GE engineers examined a broken switch on a circuit breaker critical to the startup of the lunar module's ascent engine. The circuit closed, the engine fired, and Armstrong (pictured) and Aldrin went home.
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NASA used GE displays to receive pictures of Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the moon.
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The visors of the astronauts’ helmets were made from Lexan, a transparent, super-strong plastic developed by GE Global Research (GRC).
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GRC also developed a new geological dating technique for analyzing Apollo 11 moon rocks. GE was one of two private companies selected to study lunar samples and search for clues about the formation of the solar system.
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Supersize Me: GE Takes 3D Printing to Massive Gas Turbines

A new 1-kilowatt 3D laser printer is finishing the GE monogram. (Our video below has the final result.)

Over the last decade, engineers at GE Aviation have been experimenting with a new way to make jet engine parts. Rather than cutting, milling and drilling engine components, they weld together thin layers of powdered metal with a 200-watt laser and build parts from the ground up. Now, other businesses are supersizing 3D printing and pushing the technology into new areas.

GE Power and Water recently acquired a laser printer that is five times as powerful as the GE Aviation machine and can work with two lasers at the same time. “We are learning how to use this technology,” says Jon Schaeffer, senior manager for materials and processing engineering for Power and Water. “We’ve got to spread the word and change the design paradigm that metallurgists, designers and manufacturing teams have had for a long time.”

Schaeffer says that the 3D printer will help speed up innovation and test new ideas and designs faster. “We’ve been able to embed new technologies into our components without the messy manufacturing steps normally required,” he says. “We are cutting out months in the development cycle with this technology.”

The printer’s build area is almost a cubic foot, large enough to print gas turbine parts. “The biggest thing that was holding us back was the size of the chamber,” Schaeffer says. “But the chamber volume has grown 50 times over the last five years. It’s almost like Moore’s law for 3D printing.”

Schaeffer, who started at GE two decades ago in GE Aviation, points to his former colleagues as a model for making advanced technologies work. GE Aviation is already printing nozzles for the next-generation LEAP jet engine. Each nozzle used to made from 18 parts welded together. It is now grown as a single piece that is 25 percent lighter than its predecessor.

David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation, says that the technology liberated his business from the limitations of machining. “It gives the designer a whole different palette of colors to paint with, and truly on a whole new canvas,” Joyce says.

Engineers at Power and Water have already used their new machine to design and print a cooling shroud for GE’s latest gas turbine. “There was a time when we could not test new designs and technologies in new parts because we were not able to make them,” Schaeffer says. “3D printing is pointing engineers in the right direction to see if they’ve got a successful concept. It’s really quite exciting.”

Go With the Flow: These Electric Air Jets Could Smooth Out Your Plane Ride

Seyed Saddoughi inspects one of his creations, a propeller using miniature piezoelectric bellows designed to generate an air jet that can spin the arm attached to the device up 1,000 rotations per minute.

Scientists at GE Global Research are experimenting with thin jets of air to reduce turbulence along aircraft wings and wind turbine blades, and to improve efficiency. They are using devices the size of two stacked credit cards to speed up air that naturally slows down due to surface friction. Just a small decrease in drag could save millions of dollars for airlines alone.

The devices, called synthetic jet actuators (SJAs), have no moving parts and work like tiny bellows. They generate rapid pumping and sucking by applying electrical current across pieces of special ceramic material attached to the sides of two nickel plates separated in the middle by a narrow space. Electricity makes the ceramic vibrate slightly and the vibrations cause the gap between the plates to pull in and push out jets of air.

“This device works like our lungs, by expanding and contracting a chamber in such a way that air is sucked in and ejected through a single hole,” says Seyed Saddoughi, principal engineer in GE’s Aero-Thermal & Mechanical Systems lab. Saddoughi, who is leading the actuator’s development, says that devices eliminate the need for fans with moving parts. “The device is lightweight, very simple in operation, and with minimal power usage.”

Because of its low energy use, powerful air jet and silent operation, a version of the device is already beginning to be used for cooling consumer electronics and computers.

But Saddoughi says SJAs will realize their potential when rows of them start getting embedded in aircraft wings and turbine blades. His research team has also been running experiments with another version that can operate in water. Their experiments have shown that pumping high-powered water jets against the surface of boat hulls can change hydrodynamic flow and decrease drag.

“These devices energize the flow close to surfaces to reduce losses and increase the overall efficiency of the machines,” he says. “Synthetic jet actuators give us active control of flow over these surfaces. We can manipulate flow intelligently to gain better performance from our machines.”

The Right Stuff: New GE Advanced Manufacturing Plant to Make Next-Gen Ceramic Parts for Jet Engines

Parts from ceramic composites will serve inside next-generation jet engines like the LEAP.

People have been using ceramics to store food, drink tea, and tile their homes for millennia. But GE engineers recently upped the ante and started putting high-grade ceramics inside jet engines.

Their version is a light super material that combines silicon with ceramic-coated silicon carbide fibers. It is tough enough to take the heat and forces inside a roaring jet engine and outperform even the most advanced alloys, and light enough to shave hundreds of pounds off a jet engine. “We are pushing ahead in materials technology, which gives us the ability to make jet engines lighter, run them hotter, and cool them less,” says GE Aviation manufacturing executive Michael Kauffman. “As result, we can make the engines, and the planes they’ll power, more efficient and cheaper to operate.”

GE is said today that it would invest $125 million and build a new 125,000 square-foot advanced manufacturing plant in Asheville, N.C., to make parts from the new material, called ceramic matrix composites, or CMCs.

The first products will be stationary high pressure turbine parts for the next-generation LEAP jet engine manufactured by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and France’s Safran. But CMCs, which weigh a third of metal alloys, could also find applications as light-weight turbine blades, rotors, and other parts. “When you start thinking about design, the weight savings multiplier effect is much more than three to one,” Kauffman says. “Your nickel-based superalloy turbine disc does not have to be so beefy to carry all those light blades, and you can slim down the bearings and other parts too because of a smaller centrifugal force. It’s just basic physics.”

Engineers at GE Global Research and GE Aviation’s pilot-scale production facility in Delaware developed the material over the last 20 years. They also designed the machines that manufacture CMCs. Pending final approval from the state of North Carolina, the Asheville facility would be the first of its kind in jet propulsion.

GE plans to use the Delaware facility to apply the highly engineered ceramic coatings onto silicon carbide fibers and then incorporate the fibers into flexible sheets together with polymers and other composite matrix materials. Workers in North Carolina will then cut the sheets into shapes, put them inside molds and compact them in giant pressure cookers called autoclaves, which make the parts take their form.

The parts then travel inside a hot oven that “burns out” the polymers and leaves a porous lattice made from the ceramic-coated silicon carbide fibers in the shape of the desired part.

A hot oven “burns out” polymers and leaves a porous lattice made from ceramic-coated silicon carbide fibers in the shape of the desired part.

The workers then melt silicon on top of the lattice and let the silicon wick its way into the shell’s nooks and crannies. “The ceramic coating the fiber is the secret sauce,” Kauffman says. “It allows us to use a relatively simple process to get really good infiltration.”

Finally, the workers will use hard diamond grinders to get the desired part dimensions. “We often use ceramics as metal cutters, so we had to go to one step beyond, to diamond,” Kauffman says. “This is a new process. We generally don’t cut anything as hard as CMCs.”

The company completed design freeze on the first two versions of the LEAP engine in June 2012. The first full LEAP engine, a LEAP-1A for the Airbus A320neo, is on schedule to begin ground testing in September of this year.

Boeing estimates that the world aircraft fleet will double in size over the next 20 years to some 40,000 planes. Much of the growth will come from single-aisle next-gen planes like the A320neo, Boeing’s the 737 MAX, and COMAC’s C919, the LEAP’s target market. CMCs will also serve inside the new GE9X engine selected by Boeing for its future 777X aircraft program.

Southwest, Lion Air, AirAsia, Virgin America, Quantas and dozens of other airlines have already placed orders for more than 4,500 LEAP engines.

GE estimates that the new plant, along with plant and equipment upgrades across GE’s facilities in North Carolina, could create 240 new jobs by 2017.

He Sees The Light: Gary Allen’s TED Talk Illuminates the Future of Light

GE engineer, inventor and physicist Gary Allen has spent the last 25 years blazing a trail to a better light. He says that we are on the cusp of a lighting revolution that will lead to nearly perfect illumination. “Lighting is becoming almost everything we ever wanted it to be, and even things we never imagined,” Allen says.

Allen recently talked about his quest at a TED event in Cleveland, Ohio. “If you had a nearly ideal light source what would you do with it?” he asked the audience. “It would have long life, be vanishingly small, [have] high-precision, high-efficiency, great color, controllable, smart, and connected."

That light source is the LED, invented 50 years ago by a former colleague Nick Holonyak. LEDs are bits of special semiconductors that convert as much as a third of the electricity that flows through them directly to light. After a flickering start, the use LED systems in commercial lighting applications has exploded over the last decade. Grocery cases, commercial ceilings, business signs, parking lots and roadways all use LEDs, and LED lights are now moving into the home. Commercial and consumer LED lighting could reach 60 percent of all sales by the end of the decade, according to some estimates. "In five years, the cost of LED light bulbs should not be a concern for most consumers," Allen says. "They’ll get a nearly perfect light bulb at an affordable price, and each one will save them $100 or more."



LEDs are so efficient because of the way they convert electricity into light. Thomas Edison’s breakthrough 1879 light bulb could only convert about one percent of electricity into light and wasted the rest as heat. If you've recently tried to touch a lit old-fashioned light bulb with bare hands, you know that things have not improved much over the last 130 years. Allen said that by 2030, advanced LEDs would be able to convert up to 80 percent of electricity that courses through them directly into light.

Allen started his career by working on nuclear fusion, but moved into lighting with the hope of making a more near-term difference to the world. “I wanted to see my work have a more direct impact in my lifetime,” he said. “Having worked in lighting, we’ve had an immediate and significant impact on global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. That’s been very satisfying to me.”

Torque Reform: Huge Rare-Earth Magnet Motor Will Simulate Sea Gales at Wind Turbine Test Bed

GE engineers have designed a new monster motor for testing wind turbines capable of generating extreme torques produced by gale force winds and nasty offshore storms. “It’s basically a huge wind turbine in reverse,” says Franz Hubl, global business leader for test systems at GE Power Conversion. “It generates torque instead of electricity. We can put a lifetime of stress on a wind turbine prototype in just 200 days.”

New test bed can exert a lifetime of stress on a wind turbine prototype in just 200 days.

At the heart of the motor is a huge permanent magnet made from an alloy of rare-earth elements. It can generate 20,000 horsepower (the equivalent of 150 cars) and drive the shaft at 10 to 20 rotations per minute. That’s double what a large wind turbine can typically experience on a breezy day. The motor is so large, 26 feet in diameter and 330 tons, that it had to be assembled on site.

It will power a brand new wind turbine test bed at the National Renewable Energy Center (NAREC) in Blyth, UK. The motor will work in combination with a sophisticated testing system manufactured by the American firm MTS. The MTS hydraulics and mechanical system attaches to the front of the wind turbine like a giant three-prong steel mandible that distributes the torque unevenly in simulation of extreme conditions. “We can expose the turbines to as much as twice the overload,” Hubl says. “When you have a turbine that’s 150 meters in diameter, a sudden gale can apply tremendous asymmetrical load on the bearings at the center of the turbine. The wind speed at the top of the blades will be higher than at the bottom. Now we can simulate those conditions.”

The assembly can test an entire nacelle, the large grey box sitting atop of the wind turbine tower and housing the electricity generation system.

The system will replace older technology using standard electrical motors. Those motors were spinning at 1,500 rpm and engineers had to slow them down to wind speed rotation with elaborate gearboxes.

Extreme Measures: When a Huge Tornado Struck Moore, Volunteers Raced to Help

Dennis McBride works as a GE technician servicing wind farms in Oklahoma’s tornado alley and knows a few things about wind. From early in the morning on May 20, he had a feeling that it would be a rough day. While out on the job at the Blue Canyon wind farm near Lawton, his phone kept buzzing in his pocket with severe weather alerts. Around noon his boss, Kenny Weaver, told him to secure equipment and go to a shelter – a dangerous storm cell was moving through the state. “The weather looked bad,” Weaver says. “Our work was pretty much done that day.”

The storm rolled right over the wind farm. But it saved its crushing blow for the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, about an hour north of Lawton. Moore has since become a somber symbol for the ravages of severe weather.

Trained to Help: Dennis McBride (left) and Patrick “Codie” Lang (middle) spent two days helping Moore dig out and recover from a massive tornado. Kenny Weaver stayed behind and helped them pull through.

News helicopters tracking the storm were reporting the Moore devastation live on TV and McBride, who used to live in the area, realized the situation was serious. He and his colleague Patrick “Codie” Lang, a 21-year-old Navy vet who grew up near Moore, checked in with Weaver and prepared to head north.

They loaded a Ford pickup truck GE kept at the wind farm with clean water, cut-resistant gloves, headlamps, first-aid kits and a heart defibrillator machine. “We grabbed just about anything first-aid that we could get our hands on,” McBride says.

As GE wind technicians, McBride and Lang had been trained in personnel rescue and resuscitation, and they could safely operate at heights. But they did not know what to expect from a storm of this magnitude. “On the ride there, we talked to each other and tried to get our mind set on what was fixing to happen,” McBride says. “You prepare for the worst and move from there.”

Weaver, who stayed behind, reached the rescue command post in Moore on his cellphone and told the soldiers running it that McBride, Lang and another crew from northern Oklahoma were coming with help.

McBride and Lang arrived in Moore three hours after the storm hit. When McBride turned the pickup into the command post that had been set up in a Home Depot parking lot, he was shocked. “It was a scene that you never want to see,” he says.

They checked in with the soldiers at the post and because of their training and their helmets, head lamps, gloves and other protective gear they brought along, they were assigned to a fire brigade that had raced to Moore from Velma, Oklahoma, some 80 miles away.

McBride and Lang knew the area and the team soon started looking for survivors on an obliterated residential block near Interstate 35. “We went straight to the first house on the corner and started moving through the rubble, looking for anything and everything that might be there,” McBride says.

They searched for survivors, victims, and pets, peeling off the remains of soggy houses and shattered furniture, moving piles of bricks, and prying open crushed cars. They inspected black gaping basements while the firefighters used detectors to check for natural gas leaks. “The smell of this kind of devastation is like nothing else,” McBride says. “It’s the dirt, raw sewage from the shattered septic system, gasoline, food and water all mixed together. Pictures do it no justice.”

McBride and Lang agreed to call Weaver and check in with him every hour. Weaver had been living in Moore in 1999 when another devastating tornado tore through, so he knew their job would be hard. “I knew they may come across some things they’ve never seen in their lives,” Weaver says. “I had to make sure that they were safe and their heads were focused.”

The two kept searching through the rubble until the next afternoon, when they collapsed in the command post for a few hours of sleep. In the evening on May 21 they returned to their team and continued clearing the neighborhood for another day. They left Moore when the Oklahoma National Guard took over.

Back at work, Weaver set up McBride and Lang with counseling, but they were back on the job the same week.

Says McBride: “We were trained to help.”

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.