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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![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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Big Data Meets Industrial 3-D Printing
Even in the lofty world of aerospace components, GE’s new 3-D printed jet engine fuel nozzle is a rare bird. Workers build it as a single piece by welding together bits of superalloy dust with lasers. The new nozzle is 25 percent lighter and as much as five times more durable than the current nozzle made from 20 different parts.
But here’s the rub. 3-D printing is so new that engineers have to develop new quality-control methods before jumping into mass production. “We are dealing with a microscopic weld pool that’s moving at hundreds of millimeters per second,” says Todd Rockstroh, a mechanical engineer at GE Aviation. “Every cubic millimeter is a chance for a defect.”
June 6th, 2013
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Vapor Manipulations
In the 1940s, GE and government researchers were trying to figure out how to weaken the destructive power of hurricanes. Part of that work involved building an understanding of how ice crystals form in clouds. These animations come from a 1947 film showing scientists making snow in a lab freezer.
GE scientists including Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer and Bernard Vonnegut studied the science of snow. Their experiments with weather control provided Bernard’s brother, Kurt, the inspiration to write Cat’s Cradle.
May 31st, 2013
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