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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is predictable power,” Longtin says. “We are using advanced forecasting algorithms and a small amount of battery storage to meet a forecast of how much power we will be able to deliver for the next 15 minutes to one hour.”



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

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

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

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GE Invests in Pivotal to Accelerate New Analytic Services and Solutions for the Industrial Internet

GE will invest $105 million in the cloud-based software applications company Pivotal. The strategic investment in the VMware and EMC spin-off will allow GE to speed up development of advanced analytic services for the Industrial Internet.

The apps will allow customers to analyze and understand big data generated by machines and stored in the cloud. “It’s no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business transformation,” said Bill Ruh who leads GE Global Software Center in San Ramon, California. “They are enabling the Industrial Internet.”

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Over the last two decades, the Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising. The Industrial Internet combines that connectivity with low-cost sensing to turn big iron into brilliant iron. It has the potential to save a motley group of customers ranging from airlines to oil and gas companies and hospitals hundreds of billions of dollars by becoming more efficient.

Pivotal is based in San Francisco, just across the bay from San Ramon where the GE Global Software Center opened 18 months ago. Hundreds of GE software engineers are already writing Industrial Internet software at the center.

Ruh said that Pivotal was creating a platform that brings to businesses the Internet’s best features like rapid application development, data analytics and cloud architecture. “This is aligned with many of the things we are doing at GE to help accelerate our delivery of innovation, and to bring a productivity revolution that will have a positive impact on all of us,” Ruh said.

Click to watch today's live press conference.

Paul Maritz, Pivotal CEO, said that the GE investment in his company underscored “the profound change in business and the historic opportunity that Pivotal has in delivering a platform to help GE’s customers succeed.”

“We are experiencing a major change in the wide-scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructural transformation and transformation of how applications will be built and used based on cloud, mobility and big data,” Maritz said. “This transformation is also happening in enterprises where their environments must adapt to a world that is data-centric, agile and real-time.”

The investment is expected to close within a month, subject to standard regulatory approval and other closing conditions.

The Brilliant Soap Box: Hospital Uses the Industrial Internet to Fight Hospital Infections

We’ve all marveled at the image of the heroic surgeon whose calm voice and steady hands save the patient. But, in some ways, the most consistently heroic act health care providers can take comes in the moments before the surgery begins.

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Proper hand washing is the easiest and most effective way to prevent hospital-acquired infections, which cause nearly 100,000 deaths each year and cost billions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But CDC data also shows that hand-washing by providers occurs only 55 percent of the time.

GE Healthcare and HCA’s Summerville Medical Center are now using the Industrial Internet, a network connecting doctors, patients, and machines, to improve that statistic. They’ve deployed GE’s AgileTrac RTLS (Real-Time Location System) Hand Hygiene solution, a software and data system that tracks clinicians’ hand washing.

Like a wet soap, this simple task can be surprisingly hard to grasp. But GE engineers designed AgileTrac to help track medical equipment, patients and staff. The system provides a real-time view of resources and how they are caring for patients, enabling doctors, nurses and managers to better predict and prevent problems.

It can also handle hand washing. Caregivers simply wear badges that count each room entry and exit and the use of soap or sanitizer dispensers. Everything is automated, no need to log in or interfere with existing hospital processes.

Tracking caregiver behavior is critical since approximately 20 to 40 percent of all hospital acquired infections are transmitted to patients by hospital employees, according to the American Journal of Infection Control. AgileTrac collects around 5,000 data points per day, compared with 700 data points per year from so-called “secret shopper” observation tactics. That data is used to track, and ultimately improve, the patient experience.

“The greatest value of this technology has proven to be the data – the fact you can look at individual workflows and departments and make changes accordingly. It’s a constant reminder to put the patient first,” said Summerville Medical Center CEO Louis Caputo.

The technology debuted in spring 2012 at the Summerville Medical Center's intensive care unit, which saw an immediate improvement. The medical center has expanded the program to surgery units and the ER since then. “Our collaboration with Summerville has been invaluable as we look to tackle one of healthcare’s toughest challenges in a data driven way,” said Fran Dirksmeier, general manager for global asset management at GE Healthcare.

Ich Bin Ein Jenbacher: Massive Gas Engine to Help Germany Power Through Energy Transition

Europe’s beating industrial heart, Germany, will lose as much as fifth of its lifeblood electricity over the next decade as the country pulls the plug on nuclear reactors. A process called Energiewende will replace nuclear power with a combination of electricity from natural gas and renewables.



The idea is simple, but not the execution. Nuclear plants feed the electrical grid with crucial “base load power,” the minimum amount of electricity that must flow through the grid for the country to run. Unlike wind or solar electricity, which ebb and flow with the whims of the weather, base load power must remain reliable and always on. “Germany has to make up for all that base load power generation,” says Scott Nolen, product line leader for power generating gas engines at GE Power & Water. “The country also has very high targets for renewable power. But we’ve built a new engine that can take care of both.”

Nolen is talking about a new J920 FleXtra gas engine from GE's Jenbacher line. It is the largest and most-efficient engine GE has ever built. At 9.5 megawatts, the engine, which is part of GE's ecomagination portfolio, generates more than twice as much power as other GE Jenbacher gas engines. It converts nearly half of the energy from burning gas to electricity (48.7 percent), another company record, and can supply customers with heat and hot water. The engine’s combined power and thermal efficiency can reach as high as 90 percent. “This is the first blank-sheet-of-paper engine design that GE’s Jenbacher business has done in a long time,” Nolen says. “This is not a scaled up engine, this is not an improvement on an engine. This is the most efficient simple cycle engine in GE’s portfolio.”

Nolen says that the new engine is “a great power generation innovation” because it can start up and shut down quickly, and allow utilities to meet the challenges that renewables, with their power fluctuations, impose on the grid. (Energiewende set renewable energy targets at whopping 60 percent of Germany’s total electricity needs by 2050.) “Let me tell you, living in Germany, the sun isn’t out all the time,” Nolen says. “With this engine, you can really have that flexibility, to be able to start up, meet the demand and then shut down quickly without wasting a lot of fuel when the sun does come out.”

Nolen says that clusters of the new engines could generate over 100 megawatts of power and still retain their high efficiency. “This is why distributed power is so attractive,” he says. “You have the capability to supply the engines all over the place where people need heat and power and get maximum efficiency out of every precious hydrocarbon molecule you have to burn.”

In Europe, the new engine will sit at the core of a municipal power plant in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim, population 61,000. The engine, in combination with four smaller Jenbacher engines and a waste incineration plant, will supply Rosenheim burghers and businesses with 40 percent of their electricity needs and a fifth of their heat. “The energy transition plant Energiewende can be achieved only if there is a cooperative effort, including contributions by municipal providers,” says Marcel Huber, Bavarian minister of state for environment and health.

But the engine has applications around the world. GE engineers designed a special two-stage turbocharger for the engine, similar to what you might find in Formula 1 race cars. It uses exhaust gas to compress the air flowing inside the engine and achieve the maximum power. One benefit of the design is that the engine can work efficiently in higher altitudes where the air is thinner, like in Mexico City. “A gas engine in Mexico City would be able to put out close to 90 percent of its rated power,” Nolen says.

Besides locations like Mexico, where it can be used to “firm up” the grid when base load starts to sag, the engine will have applications in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where even people in cities often lack power. “They can use these engines in a distributed fashion to supply the grid, or operate in an island mode when there’s no grid.”

From Energiewende to energy for the world, the new engine will help keep the power on.

Designed for Speed: GE Opens Thousands of Patents to Garage Inventors from the Quirky Community

Ever since Samuel Hopkins received the first U.S. patent for making potash in 1790, inventors and companies have used patents as shield and sword to protect their ideas. Not anymore. Channeling the lean startup vibe, GE has invited innovators to turn swords into gadgets.



For the first time in the company’s history, GE will open thousands of patents to a community of inventors and tinkerers gathered around Quirky, an innovative design company using online collaboration and crowdsourcing to develop new products.

GE and Quirky will also launch “Wink: Instantly Connected,” a product development platform focused on building a co-branded line of app-enabled domestic devices connected to the Internet. These gadgets will improve health, water and air quality, and security, and can be produced by using advanced manufacturing tools and technologies like 3-D printing. Quirky will develop the products for distribution to large U.S. retailers. People can start pitching their ideas today.

The Wink products will marry everyday things with the Internet and bring this union, which GE calls the Industrial Internet, to people’s homes. Ben Kaufman, Quirky founder and CEO, says that “our future will be driven by access to things via our smartphones – there is a ton of invention to be done in this area and no one owns this category.”

Kaufman says that "for years patents have become widely misunderstood and misused. We are going to return patents to their original purpose to act as a blueprint for technological and societal progress while protecting inventors and becoming a source of inspiration for future creators.”

GE will first open up patents that include optical systems, a potentially disruptive technology called dual cooling jets, and surface coating methods called barrier coating.

Besides its patents and technology, GE will also bring to the partnership commercial expertise and scale. Quirky will contribute crowdsourcing know-how and speedy product development. “We admire Quirky’s speed, collaboration and inventiveness and by opening up lab-proven technology and patents to everyday inventors we can help inspire new ideas and accelerate advanced manufacturing innovation,” said Beth Comstock, GE’s chief marketing officer. “At GE we are passionate about innovation at market speed, working with entrepreneurs and finding new models for business. This partnership is just another way we can help inspire invention and help scale it.”

Starting with Thomas Edison, GE’s success and growth has stood on innovation and product development. Two GE employees have received Nobel Prizes and three other Nobel laureates spent time working at GE Global Research labs (GRC). GE engineers have built machines and devices that revolutionized how we live, from the first U.S. jet engine and the first full-body MRI machine, to the invention of the LED.

GRC employs 3,000 scientists in six labs around the world, including 1,125 PhDs. In 2012 alone, GE filed 3,522 patents and spent $4.5 billion on research and development.

Resistance is Futile: GE Tests Breakthrough High-Temperature Superconducting Power Plant Technology

A century ago, Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled a ring made from mercury near the absolute zero [at 0 Kelvin (minus 459 F) the coldest possible temperature], sent through electrical current and removed the battery. One year later, the current was still flowing. The experiment helped Kamerlingh Onnes discover superconductivity, a physical phenomenon that drops electrical resistance to zero in extremely cold metals. It also helped him win the Nobel Prize.

Electrical resistance is why light bulbs, batteries and wires get hot. That heat, though, is waste. If our appliances and power plants were superconductive, they would become hugely more efficient, allowing us to use the same electricity over and over again.

The heat is on: GE engineers test high-temperature superconducting power generator.

But superconductive machines remain elusive. A century after Kamerlingh Onnes’ discovery, scientists are still struggling to make superconductivity work at balmier temperatures.

Last week, however, researchers at GE Power Conversion turned on the heat. The tested a new superconducting generator called Hydrogenie. The GE team replaced copper wires wound on the rotor inside the generator with a metal base covered with a superconducting ceramic layer. They made the machine work at 43 Kelvin (minus 383 F) and produce 1.7 megawatts of electricity.

Minus 383 F is still quite frigid, but for superconductivity researchers it’s like a trip to the tropics. They call the new technology “high temperature superconductors” for good reason. Until recently, superconductivity still shivered near 4 Kelvin, where Kamerlingh Onnes’ experiments left it. “This technology is a true breakthrough,”says Martin Ingles, GE Power Conversion manager for Hydrogenie. Ingles says that Hydrogenie could “radically improve” the efficiency of wind and water turbines, ocean ship propulsion, and other technology.

Because the ceramic and metal windings have virtually no resistance, their cross section could be as small as 2 percent of the copper wires used inside motors today. This could bring a new age of small, light, and extremely powerful motors and generators.

The GE researchers had to crack hard technical problems to design the new system. “It’s rather like trying to keep ice cubes frozen on a rotisserie in a very hot oven,” Ingles says. To keep the system cold, they pipe frigid helium gas into the machine rotor and then send it around the individual coils. Although they placed the rotor inside a vacuum for better insulation, it still has some direct contact, via its shaft, with the outside world. The temperature difference problem along the shaft – scientists call it temperature gradient - is a big problem. Imagine plunging your teeth into a scoop of ice cream, except hundreds of degrees colder.

But the GE team developed a patented method for dealing with the gradient and transferring torque from the cold coils to the rotor. They also designed “low resistance thermal joints and assemblies” that minimize the cooling power required to cool the coils.

GE says that “the machine demonstrates all of the technologies required” to make high-temperature semiconducting machines “a commercial reality.”

Electricity has never been this cool.