The Art of Science: Supercomputers Help Scientists See What Microscopes and Cameras Can’t Capture

Scientists at GE Global Research have been using the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate everything from fuel flowing through jet engine nozzles to water drops turning into ice. The results can be rewarding beyond solving research riddles. “Many times our work generates images that are visually breathtaking,” says Rick Arthur, who leads the Advanced Computing Lab at GRC.

Supercomputers are helping GE engineers speed up innovation, crack previously intractable problems, and shorten the business cycle. Take a look at our slideshow featuring a hypnotizing turbine flow, density gradients and other arresting images generated by GRC scientists.

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The “blue blobs” shown in this picture represent particles in an advanced nickel alloy used to manufacture high-pressure turbine rotors and cooling systems for jet engines. The model is a simulation of what happens to the size and distribution of the particles when the alloy rapidly cools at a rate of 200 degrees Fahrenheit per minute.
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This picture shows a simulation of a liquid spray from a jet engine fuel injector. Fuel injectors have an intricate design and must handle punishing heat and pressure. They are notoriously difficult to test and build. “High-fidelity computer simulations can significantly reduce the number of trials and can provide insights into why a fuel injector behaves the way it does,” says Madhu Pai, computational combustion engineer at GRC. This image was generated on the Sierra supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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Arthur calls this computer-generated image of a low-pressure turbine “chromatic ring.” His team used the Jaguar supercomputer based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to model fluid dynamics inside the turbine. They were looking for tiny variations that could help them improve turbine efficiency.
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Here is a close-up of the previous image.
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This image does not represent a serving of Rice Krispies treats but three nickel-alloy computer models generated by a GRC server cluster. They help scientists understand the microstructure of the alloy molecules and gain insight into the properties of the metal.
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This picture shows the density of a jet engine exhaust flow. GE engineers are using it to increase jet engine performance and reduce noise. The image was created on the Intrepid computer network at Argonne National Lab.
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This picture is a two-dimensional cut-away from the previous image.
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This hypnotizing image shows an unsteady flow inside the low-pressure turbine of a jet engine. GRC scientists are using an in-house code to visualize the “unsteadiness” and get a better understanding of the aerodynamic losses inside the turbine. This helps them design more efficient engines.
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This simulation shows ice spreading through a water droplet. The model shown above was developed on Titan at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, currently the top ranked supercomputer in the world. GRC scientists are using the research to develop icephobic surfaces that prevents ice creation and build up on turbine blades, oil and gas rigs and elsewhere. Video credits: Mike Matheson, Oak Ridge National Lab.
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This image shows noise generation due to turbulent flow over the trailing edge of a wind-turbine blade. High fidelity computer simulations provide engineers with better insights into noise sources and noise generation mechanisms, and help them design low-noise blades. These images were generated by the Red Mesa, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers based at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. Image courtesy of Prof. Sanjiva Lele, Stanford University
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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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Popular Science: #6SecondScience Fair Gets 4-Minute Video Treatment

What happens when you mix cupcakes, Play-Doh, dry ice and a smartphone app? You get an eruption of playful videos illustrating basic elements of science raging from electromagnetism from frog anatomy in just six seconds. That’s what happened in mid-August when GE hosted its #6SecondScience fair and invited DIY scientists to film and upload their experiments on the video-sharing app Vine. The week-long event ended on August 18 and generated more than 600 submissions. GE’s social media team has now gathered some of the best and stitched them into a four-minute video. Take a look.

Science In Action: Inside GE’s Research Labs

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Engineers at GE Global Research are developing advanced devices called synthetic jet actuators. These piezoelectric bellows can make air and water flow more efficiently across aircraft wings, wind turbine blades and boat hulls. Here, a water-adapted synthetic jet actuator fires a jet like a fountain in a lab demonstration.
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GRC engineers built this demonstration to show the power of non-thermal plasma. They generate a “cold” plasma inside the clear box on the right using high voltage, low current electricity. Smoke inside the box is pumped out through the vent in the middle when the electricity breaks the surrounding air into ions, which creates flow. This system transforms electrical energy into mechanical energy while using no moving parts. The team investigates non-thermal plasma technology to assist engine combustion by improving fuel burn and performance.
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Researchers at GE Global Research are putting advanced insulation through its paces by zapping it with high voltage electricity.
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Seyed Saddoughi, the principal engineer in Aero-Thermal & Mechanical Systems lab at GRC, inspects one of his creations. His research team developed a propeller by attaching a synthetic jet actuator to a rotatable arm. Like the device in the first image, this is a piezoelectric bellows, made of two slightly separated metallic sheets that suck in and expel air when electrified. Their motion generates a jet of air that powers the propeller up to 1,000 rotations per minute. The work is part of their investigations into advanced active flow and combustion control.
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This ultra-efficient water-jet cutter can blast through slabs of metal with ease. GRC engineers are investigating the computer-guided advanced milling tool for use in several industries. Here, the water jet is being tested to cut wind turbine parts from a solid aluminum ingot. Firing an abrasive mixture of garnet dust and plain water at a pressure of 60,000 pounds per square inch, the water-jet cutter could dramatically reduce manufacturing time at GE plants.
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GRC scientists are working on advanced "superhydrophobic" coatings that can completely repel water.
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Nobody likes turbulence. The familiar kind of air turbulence may rattle nerves and spill coffee into passengers’ laps. But planes also suffer from its less palpable form along aircraft wings and engines. A few years ago, Seyed Saddoughi, who works as principal engineer in the Aero-Thermal and Mechanical Systems lab at GE Global Research (GRC), developed thin devices the size of two stacked credit cards that can smooth the drag caused by turbulence and make flying more efficient. The devices, called synthetic jet actuators, work a little like our lungs and generate rapid pumping and sucking by applying electrical current across pieces of special ceramic material separated by a narrow space.

Saddoughi’s work intrigued his GRC colleague Peter De Bock, who used the tiny bellows to build an ingenious cooling system that could make tablets and laptops thinner and quieter and add as much as 30 minutes to laptop battery life. “Innovation is about talking to people, connecting with people,” De Bock says. “[It] is about knowing the field, knowing what’s out there, what’s needed.”

Saddoughi and De Bock’s labs are at GRC headquarters in Niskayuna in upstate New York, near where Thomas Edison opened GE’s first research labs in 1900. Nobel winners such as radio telegraph inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Niels Bohr, who cracked the structure of the atom, and I.P. Pavlov famous for his conditioned dogs came for a visit.

GRC has since grown global and added labs in San Ramon, California, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, and Munich. The labs employ 3,000 people, including 1,125 PhDs. GE spends annually $6 billion on R&D and GRC scientists are working on a long list of problems, from new materials for jet engines and gas turbines to molecular diagnostics, better batteries, and software analytics for turbines and oil & gas rigs that crunch data coming over the Industrial Internet.

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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Cool Computing: GE Scientists Use Supercomputer to Freeze Water Molecules in Time

This simulation shows ice spreading through a water droplet. The image is a real scientific model that’s being developed on Titan, the #1 ranked supercomputer in the U.S. Video credits: Mike Matheson (Oak Ridge National Lab)

In early 2011, a tide of icy weather smothered the Caribou Wind Farm in New Brunswick in Canada and shut down the farm’s 33 turbines for a month. “The cold weather is not an issue,” Mark Hachey, the farm’s manager told CBC News. “They can run in rain, they can run in snow. It’s when you get an accumulation of ice, much similar to an airplane.” Caribou has the capacity to power 30,000 homes and Hachey told the CBC that he was looking for solutions like non-stick coating to the turbine blades to crack the persistent problem.

Scientists at GE Global Research (GRC) are already on the case. According to a recent blog post, they’ve been running ice forming simulations on the U.S. top-ranked supercomputer, Titan Cray XK7, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study how ice grows. Masako Yamada from GRC’s Advanced Computing Lab said that she can model water droplets that are 50 nanometers in size, far smaller than actual droplets, over incredibly short fragments of time called femtoseconds. (One femtosecond is to one second is what one second is to 31.7 million years.) “It’s analogous to creating a high-speed video using an atomic microscope,” Yamada said. “Titan is one of the few resources in the world that can handle our needs.”

Yamada and her team are using the research to develop icephobic surfaces that prevent ice creation and build up. This can be done by reducing “stickiness” between ice and surface, bouncing water droplets before they can freeze, delaying the onset of freezing, and lowering freezing temperature. “We can see exactly how the water molecules interact with the surfaces,” Yamada said. “This is simply impossible using any physical test. In addition, in the virtual world, the results are not impacted by dirt, defects and other random sources of noise.”

The research has applications everywhere, from windshields to the ideal ice cream scooper. “We have observed that certain types of surfaces hinder ice formation, but the exact mechanism was unknown,” says Rick Arthur, who leads the Advanced Computing Lab at GRC. “We use simulations as a means to gain insight into the conditions under which ice can be suppressed. Many industrial systems that operate in cold environments stand to benefit from resisting ice including wind turbines and offshore oil and gas drilling and production rigs operating in extremely cold environments.”

Ice stopped turbines at Caribou again in 2012, for the third year in a row. But if GE’s simulations work out, Hachey’s winter headache could be over.

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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