Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

 

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GE also signed a binding letter of intent to acquire Fairchild International, an independently owned and operated maker of underground mining equipment based in Glen Lyn, Virginia. The terms of the Fairchild transaction have not been disclosed. Fairchild manufactures continuous miners, coal haulage systems, mine maintenance vehicles, and battery-powered scoops.

The two acquisitions will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Lorenzo Simonelli, president and CEO of GE Transportation, said that both Industrea and Fairchild would benefit from GE’s experience in building battery-powered and clean propulsion systems, as well as from its global reach. “We see this as a way to bring the next generation mining equipment to customers around the globe,” Simonelli said.

The Industrea transaction must be still approved by shareholders and government regulators.

Very few companies have the technology to pull this off and GE jumped at the chance. It quickly hit a snag. “Blast furnace gas is outside of the flammable range, it won’t burn in our combustors,” says Bob Jones, manager for GE’s synthetic gas products. Engineers at GE Energy scrambled for a solution. It was staring them in the face. WISCO makes its own coke and coke ovens produce gas rich in energetic hydrogen. They scrubbed the coke gas – it contains tar – mixed it with BFG, and pressurized it in rugged compressors using GE’s oil and gas technology.

What Waste?: GE technology generates enough electricity from WISCO’s blast furnace gas to make 20 million tons of steel and power 260,000 homes.

The mix clocked in at about 15 percent of the heating value of natural gas, enough to ignite inside GE’s fuel flexible synthetic gas combustors installed in the 9E Heavy Duty Gas Turbine. “They are the workhorses in the industrial segment,” Jones says. “We have hundreds of them out in the field.”

The first unit of the WISCO power plant opened in late 2009, and a second unit a year later. The plant is now working around the clock, generating 1 billion kilowatts hours of electricity, enough to make 20 million tons of steel and even kick electricity back to the City of Wuhan to power 260,000 homes. The technology also scrubs 2 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and saves WISCO $32 million in annual operational expenses.

Key parts of the Wuhan power plant have been designed by American engineers in Schenectady, New York, and Greenvile, South Carolina. GE talked about the WISCO story and the technology behind it at AISTech 2012, a large steel industry gathering held in Atlanta last week. It built a website that illustrates how the power plant works. Find out more about it here.

Patricia joined GE as an engineering assistant in 1949. At the time, there were just 4,000 female engineers in the entire country, and no more than a handful at GE’s aviation unit, then based outside of Boston in Lynn, Massachusetts. “They were looking for people to hire for the Lynn plant,” Patricia said. She had a fresh degree in mathematics from Emmanuel College and started in a “calculating pool,” crunching engine test data with a slide rule and a couple of “really fancy” calculators. “I liked the idea that math was being used to produce something,” Patricia said.

 

 

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

Art and Patricia Leary: Patricia helped develop a key part for GE’s first supersonic engine, the J79, in the early 1950s. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020. Art spent 37 year working for GE.

Slide Rule Sister: Patricia started out in a “calculating pool,” analyzing engine test data with a slide rule. “There were no computers then,” she said. “Just a couple of really fancy calculators.”

Patricia’s bosses Gerhard Neumann and Neil Burgess led the J79 development.

Patricia’s son Mark Leary stands in front of a J79 engine at GE’s learning center in Evendale.

 

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Her boss in Lynn was Gerhard Neumann, a jet propulsion legend and innovator. She borrowed books and took GE classes in aerodynamics and gas turbine theory. But she also kept math close and enrolled for an advanced degree at Boston University. “This was well before the string theory,” she laughed. “Complex variables and the Kutta-Joukowski theorem were about as high as we ever got.” The theorem just happens to be the corner stone of aerodynamics.

The new skills came handy quickly. Neumann just started working on GE’s first supersonic jet engine, the J79. The key part of the engine that permitted speeds as high as Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, was a compressor that modulated the amount of air coming inside the engine. “It’s ridiculous that I should remember this, but I was assigned to write a report on the annular shroud, a second ring placed around the middle of the compressor blades to eliminate turbulence,” Patricia said. “We now call it mid-span shroud,” Mark jumped in.

She also analyzed data from compressor tests. The tests did not always go smoothly. “At one point the research compressor was cantilevered from the back wall of a test cell,” she recalled. “We ran it beyond its strength, it came off the wall and chewed up the floor.”

In 1949, GE started moving the aviation unit to Evendale, Ohio. The plant grew from 1,200 to 12,000 employees in just a couple of years. When Patricia first arrived in the summer of 1952, everything was still in flux. “They ran a bus directly from the downtown hotels to the plant,” she said. “So many people were transferring.”

One of them was her husband, Art, a fellow young Bostonian who worked for GE in logistics. They married, and in 1955 Patricia left jet engines for motherhood. “We were a nuclear family, just my husband, myself and the baby, with no relatives nearby,” Patricia said.

Art spent 37 years with GE, and Mark’s older brother also worked for the company. The J79 went to serve on a number on fighter planes like the F-4 Phantom. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020.

Just before they hung up, Patricia asked Mark how long he’s been at GE. “Since 1983,” Mark answered.

“God bless you,” she said. “Time gets by.”

“We’re in a difficult time right now,” says Kate Maehr, the food depository’s executive director. “We have a record number of hungry people who are turning to [food banks] for help. We need strong partners, partners like GE who can give time and financial support.”

GE has been listening. The company just wrote the food bank a $100,000 check that will pay for critical food supplies, keep delivery trucks running, and help stock soup kitchens. The award brings the total GE has given to the depository to roughly $500,000.

But there’s more. Hundreds of GE workers have also volunteered thousands of hours of their time and helped sort food at the food bank’s warehouse, load it into trucks and ship it to Cook County’s 650 pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens. “We know that [GE employees] have demands, many of them have responsibilities that span the globe” Maehr says. “[But] the impact that they have is so huge.”

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski, and Alderman Mike Zalewski were all present at the award ceremony today. “GE, in addition to being a world-leading company, is an exemplary corporate citizen in Chicago,” Emanuel said. “I commend GE and GE’s employees for their commitment and contributions to the strength and vitality of communities throughout Chicago.”

In May 2011, GE Capital announced that it would add 1,000 jobs in Chicago by 2014. That goal is on target.

Today’s announcement in Chicago was part of a larger Community Day effort across the city and its surrounding suburbs that included nearly 800 volunteers across five volunteer locations, including the Special Olympics Spring Games and Aunt Martha’s Youth Service Center and Health Center.

 

 

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

Art and Patricia Leary: Patricia helped develop a key part for GE’s first supersonic engine, the J79, in the early 1950s. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020. Art spent 37 year working for GE.

Slide Rule Sister: Patricia started out in a “calculating pool,” analyzing engine test data with a slide rule. “There were no computers then,” she said. “Just a couple of really fancy calculators.”

Patricia’s bosses Gerhard Neumann and Neil Burgess led the J79 development.

Patricia’s son Mark Leary stands in front of a J79 engine at GE’s learning center in Evendale.

Kate Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, was present at the awards ceremony with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, GE State Government Relations Manager Patrick Theisen, Managing Director for Chicago Business Development at GE Capital – Americas Linda Fiore, and Alderman Mike Zalewski

GE workers have volunteered thousands of hours of their time and helped sort food at the food bank’s warehouse, load it into trucks and ship it to Cook County’s 650 pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.

 

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The rapper Tupac Shakur, who died 16 years ago, grabbed global headlines again last month when his hologram walked on stage at the Coachella music festival and started singing. Now GE takes the holographic experience an octave higher. For five days this week, you can use the same Tupac technology fleshed out with some hands-on Minority Report magic and build your own interactive hologram of the GEnx jet engine.

The project, called Throttle Up, opened on Monday inside a warehouse in downtown Brooklyn, New York. Visitors step into the large interactive space and sync their hands with the system. Motion capture and holographic projection technology then lets them scoop up hundreds of GEnx parts floating overhead and shape the engine. “It’s about showing the complexities of what a jet engine is,” says Andy Goldberg, creative content director at GE. “But it’s also about being able to build, getting your hands dirty, if you will.”

 

 

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

Art and Patricia Leary: Patricia helped develop a key part for GE’s first supersonic engine, the J79, in the early 1950s. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020. Art spent 37 year working for GE.

Slide Rule Sister: Patricia started out in a “calculating pool,” analyzing engine test data with a slide rule. “There were no computers then,” she said. “Just a couple of really fancy calculators.”

Patricia’s bosses Gerhard Neumann and Neil Burgess led the J79 development.

Patricia’s son Mark Leary stands in front of a J79 engine at GE’s learning center in Evendale.

Kate Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, was present at the awards ceremony with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, GE State Government Relations Manager Patrick Theisen, Managing Director for Chicago Business Development at GE Capital – Americas Linda Fiore, and Alderman Mike Zalewski

GE workers have volunteered thousands of hours of their time and helped sort food at the food bank’s warehouse, load it into trucks and ship it to Cook County’s 650 pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

 

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The GEnx is the fastest selling large engine in GE history. It powers a new class of Boeing planes, the Dreamliner and 747-8 Intercontinental. The innovative engine has already set world records in speed and distance in its class. Workers at GE Aviation gave Goldberg’s team access to detailed CAD drawings of the engine and sent Throttle Up’s designers actual parts to help them get their color, texture and reflectivity right. “The model physically mimics what the real product looks like,” says Jim Whalen from GE Aviation’s marketing team.

Indeed it does. Visitors start building the hologram by placing their feet inside a small blue circle. When the system locates the position of their hands, they use simple gestures to move around blades, turbines, casings and hundreds of other parts drifting overhead and form larger engine components. The parts lock up together with a thud, as if they had mass. The finished GEnx hovers and spins above their heads. A blast of air ruffles their hair as the engine attaches to an airliner and flies away.

It took GE and partners like Float Hybrid Entertainment, which designed the gaming and gesture systems, and Musion Systems, behind the hologram, two months to put the show together and one week to stage it. Hurry up, though. The space, which is located at 56 Water Street, closes this Friday at 9pm sharp.

Numerical has been milling and lathing oil and gas equipment for GE over two decades. At the start the company had 30 workers. It now counts 84 employees who operate 20 advanced CNC mills and lathes. “We’ve grown by 20 people over the last two years alone,” Bentley says.

 

 

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

Art and Patricia Leary: Patricia helped develop a key part for GE’s first supersonic engine, the J79, in the early 1950s. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020. Art spent 37 year working for GE.

Slide Rule Sister: Patricia started out in a “calculating pool,” analyzing engine test data with a slide rule. “There were no computers then,” she said. “Just a couple of really fancy calculators.”

Patricia’s bosses Gerhard Neumann and Neil Burgess led the J79 development.

Patricia’s son Mark Leary stands in front of a J79 engine at GE’s learning center in Evendale.

Kate Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, was present at the awards ceremony with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, GE State Government Relations Manager Patrick Theisen, Managing Director for Chicago Business Development at GE Capital – Americas Linda Fiore, and Alderman Mike Zalewski

GE workers have volunteered thousands of hours of their time and helped sort food at the food bank’s warehouse, load it into trucks and ship it to Cook County’s 650 pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Take me for a spin: Lufkin’s gearboxes like this one can transmit over 80,000 horsepower from a GE gas turbine to an electricity generator. GE has 8,200 employees in Texas. A new economic impact study found that every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state. GE helps generate $5.6 billion per year for the state’s economy.

By the numbers: Last month, Numerical Precision took the wraps off a new CNC machine that will manufacture seal components for GE. GE has 8,200 employees in Texas. A new economic impact study found that every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state. GE helps generate $5.6 billion per year for the state’s economy.

 

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Numerical trains its own talent and is ready to hire more. “We run two shifts and we have to find people willing to work those many hours,” Bentley says. Managers pair up trainees with skilled workers for up to eight weeks, before they turn them loose. “We always want to have trainees in the system,” Bentley says. “It seems like we’re adding machines monthly now.”

But the GE buck does not stop in Crosby. Numerical farms out specialty operations like coating and cladding to other local businesses. “I’ve always felt that we had a very loyal relationship with GE, especially with the guys down here in Houston,” Bentley says. “They’ve always taken care of us in downtimes.”

GE’s Houston ecosystem reaches as far as Lufkin, Texas, population 35,000, two hours to the north. With 2,000 employees, Lufkin Industries, Inc. is the city’s largest employer. Some 600 workers regularly handle GE products, including multi-ton gear boxes manufactured to aircraft-precision tolerances that transmit over 80,000 horsepower from GE’s aeroderivative gas turbines to electric generators. “Our gear box is a vital part of the package that GE builds for its customers,” says Shawn Calhoun, general manager in Lufkin’s power transmission unit. Like Numerical, Lufkin uses CNC lathes, boring mills, “ultra-precision” gear tooth grinders, and other machines operated by highly –skilled workers, many driving from as far as an hour away to work.

Since Lufkin started manufacturing turbine parts for GE’s Houston plants, its business has multiplied, from 10 machines per year to as many 60 in a good year. As GE changed design and boosted turbine power, Lufkin invested heavily in new machinery and equipment and refined manufacturing processes and labor skills. “We work closely together as a team and make sure we provide the best products in the industry,” Calhoun says.

Lufkin now makes high-performance machinery for several other GE units, including GE Oil & Gas in Houston, Wisconsin, and Florence, Italy, and GE Energy in Atlanta. GE technology, with its global customer base, takes machines made by Lufkin’s Texas workers as far as the North Sea and the coast of Africa.

GE first reached out to Ameriforge 22 years ago, buying fuel combustion covers for large gas turbines. Since then, the orders grew 800 percent. Some 300 Ameriforge workers now manufacture GE products. Ameriforge’s huge brake disk for gas turbines even had a cameo in GE’s Superbowl commercial (look for it at 0:21). The company is now bidding to make torque tube assemblies and hubs for heavy duty mining trucks that GE will start building in Texas next year. Stalcup says that the deal would open as many as 80 new Ameriforge jobs in the Houston area.

 

 

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

Art and Patricia Leary: Patricia helped develop a key part for GE’s first supersonic engine, the J79, in the early 1950s. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020. Art spent 37 year working for GE.

Slide Rule Sister: Patricia started out in a “calculating pool,” analyzing engine test data with a slide rule. “There were no computers then,” she said. “Just a couple of really fancy calculators.”

Patricia’s bosses Gerhard Neumann and Neil Burgess led the J79 development.

Patricia’s son Mark Leary stands in front of a J79 engine at GE’s learning center in Evendale.

Kate Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, was present at the awards ceremony with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, GE State Government Relations Manager Patrick Theisen, Managing Director for Chicago Business Development at GE Capital – Americas Linda Fiore, and Alderman Mike Zalewski

GE workers have volunteered thousands of hours of their time and helped sort food at the food bank’s warehouse, load it into trucks and ship it to Cook County’s 650 pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Take me for a spin: Lufkin’s gearboxes like this one can transmit over 80,000 horsepower from a GE gas turbine to an electricity generator. GE has 8,200 employees in Texas. A new economic impact study found that every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state. GE helps generate $5.6 billion per year for the state’s economy.

By the numbers: Last month, Numerical Precision took the wraps off a new CNC machine that will manufacture seal components for GE. GE has 8,200 employees in Texas. A new economic impact study found that every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state. GE helps generate $5.6 billion per year for the state’s economy.

A GE worker begins the assembly of a heavy-duty compressor

A GE worker prepares a heavy-duty compressor for painting and testing.

A GE worker prepares a heavy-duty compressor for painting and testing.

A GE worker installs air and water cooling tubing inside a compressor.

A GE team installs bearings inside a compressor.

A GE team installs bearings inside a compressor.

Two GE workers add finishing touches to one of GE’s largest compressors.

Two GE workers add finishing touches to one of GE’s largest compressors.

Workers assemble an aeroderivative turbine.

Workers install fuel valves and piping inside a frame for a marine aeroderivative turbine.

Assembly work on an oil & gas machinery.

Workers prepare a floating power generation unit using GE’s LM2500 aeroderivative turbine for full dynamic tests.

GE worker services GE’s LMS100 aeroderivative turbine.

GE worker services GE’s LMS100 aeroderivative turbine.

A LMS100 turbine in final assembly at GE’s Houston service center.

A LMS100 turbine in final assembly at GE’s Houston service center.

A turbine at GE’s Houston service center.

A turbine at GE’s service center.

 

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This is the kind of symbiosis that’s on display in a new independent study that looked at GE’s impact on Texas jobs and economy. The report found that the company’s 8,200 Texas employees directly and indirectly generate $5.6 billion for the state’s economy. Every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state.

Richard Harrison, president and CEO of GHX Industrial, has felt this knock-on effect. GHX, which is based in Houston, has been supplying metal hose and high-temperature rubber hose assemblies for GE’s jet-powered aeroderivative turbines. Some 45 GHX welders, pipe fitters, hose fabricators as well as customer service work on GE products. Over the last year, GHX hired 10 new people to handle a 97% increase in GE orders. “We’ve added a second shift during peak periods and we’ve never gotten away from it,” Harrison says.

Harrison is also sticking with the GE way of doing business. “It’s a demanding environment, but it’s not unrealistic expectations,” Harrison says. “They make us better, with the strictest tolerances and the tightest specifications and on-time delivery demands.” All of GHX’s customers now benefit from the GE standard. “We could fabricate to a lesser spec with others, but we don’t,” Harrison says. “We build them all the same. It makes us a much better company.”

GE has deep roots in Houston. The company has been growing and adding jobs in the area for over a century. But GE expansion applies to all of Texas. Last year, GE Transportation announced that it would spend $190 million on two new factories in Fort Worth and create as many as 900 manufacturing jobs there. One plant will make GE’s fuel-efficient Evolution Series locomotives and other rail equipment. The second plant will build electric motorized wheels powering million-pound mining trucks. The wheels tower 13 feet and weigh over 100,000 pounds.

Companies like the Houston-based Ameriforge are already bidding to supply the new plants with parts and create new jobs of their own. Gean B. Stalcup, president and CEO of Ameriforge, said that he would hire as many as 80 workers at his Houston plant to manufacture torque tube assemblies and hubs for the mining trucks.

 

 

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global market for mining equipment like Fairchild’s continuous miner featured above.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market. Featured above is Fairchild’s manufacturing plant.

Do You Mine?: The acquisitions of Industrea Limited and Fairchild International will launch GE into the $61 billion global mining equipment market.

Art and Patricia Leary: Patricia helped develop a key part for GE’s first supersonic engine, the J79, in the early 1950s. GE estimates that more than 1,300 J79 engines are still in service, and many are projected to continue through 2020. Art spent 37 year working for GE.

Slide Rule Sister: Patricia started out in a “calculating pool,” analyzing engine test data with a slide rule. “There were no computers then,” she said. “Just a couple of really fancy calculators.”

Patricia’s bosses Gerhard Neumann and Neil Burgess led the J79 development.

Patricia’s son Mark Leary stands in front of a J79 engine at GE’s learning center in Evendale.

Kate Maehr, executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, was present at the awards ceremony with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, GE State Government Relations Manager Patrick Theisen, Managing Director for Chicago Business Development at GE Capital – Americas Linda Fiore, and Alderman Mike Zalewski

GE workers have volunteered thousands of hours of their time and helped sort food at the food bank’s warehouse, load it into trucks and ship it to Cook County’s 650 pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Build your engines: GE’s Throttle Up interactive hologram lets visitors build their own GEnx jet engine from hundreds of parts suspended overhead.

Take me for a spin: Lufkin’s gearboxes like this one can transmit over 80,000 horsepower from a GE gas turbine to an electricity generator. GE has 8,200 employees in Texas. A new economic impact study found that every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state. GE helps generate $5.6 billion per year for the state’s economy.

By the numbers: Last month, Numerical Precision took the wraps off a new CNC machine that will manufacture seal components for GE. GE has 8,200 employees in Texas. A new economic impact study found that every 100 GE jobs support 213 additional jobs in the state. GE helps generate $5.6 billion per year for the state’s economy.

A GE worker begins the assembly of a heavy-duty compressor

A GE worker prepares a heavy-duty compressor for painting and testing.

A GE worker prepares a heavy-duty compressor for painting and testing.

A GE worker installs air and water cooling tubing inside a compressor.

A GE team installs bearings inside a compressor.

A GE team installs bearings inside a compressor.

Two GE workers add finishing touches to one of GE’s largest compressors.

Two GE workers add finishing touches to one of GE’s largest compressors.

Workers assemble an aeroderivative turbine.

Workers install fuel valves and piping inside a frame for a marine aeroderivative turbine.

Assembly work on an oil & gas machinery.

Workers prepare a floating power generation unit using GE’s LM2500 aeroderivative turbine for full dynamic tests.

GE worker services GE’s LMS100 aeroderivative turbine.

GE worker services GE’s LMS100 aeroderivative turbine.

A LMS100 turbine in final assembly at GE’s Houston service center.

A LMS100 turbine in final assembly at GE’s Houston service center.

A turbine at GE’s Houston service center.

A turbine at GE’s service center.

Bright Lights: Glenn Kuenzler, holding the LED bulb, and his team of NELA engineers, shown clockwise: Kuenzler, Jerry Martins, Anthony Rotella, and Bruce Roberts. Bose Chinniah, who perfected the bulb’s optics, is not featured.

 

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Kuenzler’s team has developed a new LED bulb that looks and shines like the 100-watt incandescent workhorse likely burning in your kitchen, but consumes less than one third of the power and lasts 25,000 hours, or over 22 years, if turned on 3 hours per day. “We first thought about it three years ago,” Kuenzler says. “But it was not technically achievable.”

Those are challenging words to any curious engineer. Kuenzler’s team spent a few years working out the hurdles and checking out available technology. In June 2011 they started on the new LED bulb.

Kuenzler’s chief nemesis was heat. Though LEDs need a fraction of the power consumed by the incandescent bulb, the 27 watts that run the new bulb still make the LEDs inside so hot they could boil a cup of tea. LEDs are made from silicon, just like the semi-conductor chips inside your computer. Without cooling, they will burn up.

Kuenzler and his team searched for the right device to keep the heat down. A tiny fan, perhaps? “We wanted to meet people’s expectations and make the bulb last 25,000 hours,” Kuenzler says. “That means that every component for the bulb has to last at least that long.” But the best fans are very expensive and fail after 15,000 hours.

Another device called synthetic jet, or synjet, looked promising. Developed by the ecomagination Challenge winner Nuventix, it works like a pair of tiny vibrating sub-woofer speakers mounted back to back. The vibrations push hot air away from the LEDs and the device lasts as long as 100,000 hours. There was one problem. “It was the size of a puck,” Kuenzler says. “There was no way it would fit inside the bulb. There wouldn’t be any room for anything else.”

The whole process was like building a ship inside a bottle, but they shrunk the synjet and moved on the next challenge: the light itself. Unlike tungsten filaments inside regular light bulbs which glow evenly in every direction, LEDs shine straight ahead. “We had to bend the light,” Kuenzler says. The team developed special optics that send light around the synjet and other components, and make it shine like a light bulb. “If the cooling blocks the light, you don’t have a bulb,” Kuenzler says.

The team went through seven designs in nine months before they had a winner in early spring 2012. The work fetched a number of patent applications. GE Lighting is planning to move the LED bulb to production early next year.

With the engineering work done, it’s now on to education. “The whole market has been conditioned to understand light from the perspective of watts,” Kuenzler says. “But people don’t really want to use 100 watts, they want 1,600 lumens of light,” he says, the light output of a standard 100-watt incandescent light bulb. The new LED is set to make strides in changing that old mindset.

The Doctor Will See You Now: New GE system uses data from 12,000 turbines to spot trouble before it happens.

Mihok’s quest started in 2009, after a blade shifted at a U.S. wind farm. “During the investigation we analyzed the data for what might have caused it,” Mihok says. “We realized that there was a very clear data signature for what the issue was.”

The team then searched and sifted a pool of turbine data. They looked for patterns, first in Excel spreadsheets and then in an online database. “We found other turbines with the exact same data signature for the exact same problem,” Mihok says. “We took them off-line, did a quick repair, and got them back going again.”

The engineers then widened their net. They built proprietary software and algorithms to spot odd vibrations, hot bearings, low power production and other anomalies. “We mine the data for features that let us know that there is a sick turbine out there,” Mihok says. GE knows the game. For many years it’s been remotely monitoring jet engines, helicopters, locomotives, and rotating oil and gas equipment.

Sensors inside each turbine perform an automatic check-up every 10 minutes. They send the information to a central database, which holds gigabytes of data from 12,000 turbines around the world. Some 150 unique rules and algorithms then analyze it and the system automatically sends out an alert when an anomaly is detected. The alert includes specific information about the problem, what needs to be corrected, and how soon to react. It travels to a field technician who will fix it to avoid failure.

GE has built more than half the wind turbines in the U.S. The company estimates that the system that the GE Energy team developed, called PulsePOINT, has saved over $30 million in avoided repairs, lost production, and maintenance costs.