GE Announces Plan to Move Machines to the Cloud
GE said today it would start moving far more complex machines to the cloud and build the first big data and analytic platform robust enough to manage the torrent of information generated by turbines, jet engines, medical scanners and other technology.
The company has partnered with Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the development of the cloud ‑ and coined its name ‑ to broaden GE’s data software and analytical offerings. GE also expanded its partnerships with Accenture and Pivotal to develop new Industrial Internet services and deploy new high-volume machine data management software based on the powerful Hadoop open-source framework.
Watch a rebroadcast of the conference:
The GE “machine cloud” technology will undergird the Industrial Internet, a robust data network designed to bring machines into the digital age, equip them with sensors and software, and use the data they generate to make customers more efficient.
June 18th, 2013
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A 3-D View of Our Cosmic Neighborhood
If you’re into thinking about the scale of the universe and other cosmographic questions that overwhelm the senses, this video might just blow your mind.
The international team of scientists who put it together created a 3-D map of the galaxies within 300 million light-years of the Milky Way. They show scale and movement within this astronomical sphere by panning, zooming and rotating around, making it easy to forget that Earth is a tiny speck buried in the vastness of this representation of the cosmos.
“The large-scale structure of the universe is a complex web of clusters, filaments, and voids,” said the University of Hawaii announcement released with the video. “Large voids—relatively empty spaces—are bounded by filaments that form superclusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the universe. Our Milky Way galaxy lies in a supercluster of 100,000 galaxies.”
Top Image: Map showing all galaxies in the local universe color-coded by their distance to us: blue galaxies are the closest, and red are farther, up to 300 million light-years away. Courtesy University of Hawaii.
June 18th, 2013
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Engineers Developing Cell-Phone Sonar
In the 2008 blockbuster film “The Dark Knight,” Batman taps into every phone in Gotham City and, like his namesake bats, uses sonar-like imaging to map the world from echoes he overhears. Now scientists have invented a real-world version of that technology, researching a way that might one day calculate the shapes of rooms by listening to the cell phones within them.
Animals like bats and dolphins—and even some blind people—navigate the world by listening to sounds reflected off their surroundings, a sensory technique called echolocation. Electrical engineer Ivan Dokmanic at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and his colleagues have developed a computer algorithm that can generate a 3-D model of a simple room using four microphones that can pick up echoes from sounds such as finger snaps, literally making it a snap to map a room.
“If someone told me some years ago that you can grab a couple of microphones, put them in a room, snap your fingers and have your computer calculate the shape of the room from the echoes, I’d be surprised,” Dokmanic says. “We turn something that’s usually considered to be annoying and what people usually try to get rid of — the echoes — into something very useful.”
June 18th, 2013
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![New GE Advanced Manufacturing Plant to Make Next-Gen Ceramic Parts for Jet Engines
by GE Reports
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 jet-age china is a light supermaterial that combines silicon with ceramic-coated carbon fibers. It is tough enough to take the heat and forces inside a roaring jet engine and outperform even the most advanced steel alloys, and light enough to shave hundreds of pounds from the machine.
“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 a result, we can make the engines, and the planes they’ll power, more efficient and cheaper to operate.”
GE said today it would invest $125 million to 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.[[MORE]]
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 alloy 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 plant-size ceramics laboratory in Delawaredeveloped the material over the last 20 years. They also designed the machines to 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 lab and a manufacturing test bed to supply the Asheville plant with flexible CMCs sheets made from ceramics coated carbon fibers bound together by a plastic polymer. Workers in North Carolina would then cut the sheets into shapes, put them inside molds and pack them tightly together 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 polymer and leaves a tight lattice made from ceramic-coated carbon fibers in the shape of the desired part. “You basically have a hollow shell of fibers,” Kauffman says.
(A hot oven “burns out” the polymer and leaves a tight lattice made from ceramic-coated carbon fibers in the shape of the desired part.)
Workers then melt a silicon wafer 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.
Top Image: Parts from ceramic composites will serve inside next-generation jet engines like the LEAP.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/fdf44f46ba258e4072c6e8fc8f1694e4/tumblr_mojrwjT0rN1rwn6y8o1_400.gif)
New GE Advanced Manufacturing Plant to Make Next-Gen Ceramic Parts for Jet Engines
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 jet-age china is a light supermaterial that combines silicon with ceramic-coated carbon fibers. It is tough enough to take the heat and forces inside a roaring jet engine and outperform even the most advanced steel alloys, and light enough to shave hundreds of pounds from the machine.
“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 a result, we can make the engines, and the planes they’ll power, more efficient and cheaper to operate.”
GE said today it would invest $125 million to 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.
June 17th, 2013
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