When detailed design of a jet engine meets research

Our Aviation business traditionally owns detailed design of jet engine components, and my team traditionally owns research topics on new cooling, modeling, and measurements technologies. We are now forming a sub-team that will straddle both the Global Research and Aviation roles – some real design work, on our most challenging and advanced engines, with elements of our newest technologies. I am looking for five talented folks to join this hybrid team.

The design element is a little different than our traditional research positions, but I’m really excited by it. Most people we hire are brilliant researchers, but don’t have direct experience in turbomachinery heat transfer. By adding a real design element to the first several years of a researcher’s career, I expect that these folks will get smarter faster about what it takes to get technology into jet engines, enhancing their careers over the long haul.

Sound interesting to you? If so, here are the must have’s.

- An incredibly strong background in fundamentals of heat transfer, fluid dynamics, or related fields

- A very compelling research background. I’m not interested if your thesis or dissertation is just what your advisor told you to do…I want to know why was your work innovative? Why is it incredible important? What key decisions did you make…how did you LEAD your thesis or dissertation research?

- An incredible passion to tackle challenging problems and develop bold technologies, but especially passionate about getting those technologies onto real jet engines…fast.

Think you fit the mold so far? Here’s what you don’t have to have:

- Expertise in turbomachinery or gas turbine heat transfer. That’s definitely a bonus, but not a requirement. We can teach you that. Instead, I want to know that, in whatever fluid dynamic or heat transfer research you conducted, that you were the best-of-the-best…that you solved a challenging problem with excellent scientific insights and innovation.

- A background in heat transfer. The job heavily involves heat transfer, and specific experience in heat transfer is a bonus, but as long as you have a strong background in fluid dynamics, combustion, or a related fluids field, you will be a viable candidate.

Whether you are about to graduate from college, or have many years of experience, if you have an advanced degree in a relevant engineering discipline and think you will blow away my criteria above, then I want to hear from you. Click on the links below to check out the job postings and send in your resume.

Can’t wait to get you on our team!

Job Postings:

Mechanical Engineer-Thermal Systems

Lead Heat Transfer CFD Engineer 

Senior Heat Transfer Design Engineer

Lead Heat Transfer Design Engineer

Computational Heat Transfer Engineer

Events like this are very invigorating to me for several reasons. One highlight of the ARPA-E summit is the slate of interesting speakers that address the crowd. Speakers range from politicians, to researchers, to business leaders. Some of my favorites:

-At the top was T. Boone Pickens, famous for the Pickens Plan. I’ve followed Pickens for years now, and have always resonated with his clarity of thought. He is pushing hard for the U.S. to get a plan for energy, and he is right (“…a fool with a plan is better than a genius with no plan…”). And he has pushed for decades for the U.S. to shift away from imported oil as much as possible, and shift to natural gas as a transportation fuel. If you’ve followed our blogs in the past, you know that we are very bullish on NG vehicles…it’s a personal passion of mine.

-Elon Musk, creator of Pay Pal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, among others. Elon is such an interesting leader. I appreciate his clear thinking on how to assess a problem on first principles and physics. If this is in conflict with what the world is doing, then you have unearthed an excellent opportunity. Certainly SpaceX follows that pattern.

-Mitch Daniels, former Governer of Indiana, and now president at Purdue. One topic he mentioned is that Purdue has now told its students that they own any inventions they create while at Purdue, rather than the university. This is very different than most universities, which are increasingly active in monetizing the IP of their students and professors. President Daniels’ reasoning is that there is more long-term value in students starting businesses with their IP, rather than the university licensing to others.

There were so many other interesting speakers…hard to pick just three!

Even more important was the opportunity to network with other energy researchers, particularly folks from start-ups. One of the great things about the U.S. is the uncountable number of start-ups, especially in the energy space. I’ve got great researchers with great ideas on my team at GE, but we have the humility to know that for every researcher who works for GE, there are 10,000 who don’t, and many of them have great ideas too! So I’m constantly on the look-out for small businesses with great ideas, many of whom are excited about potentially partnering with GE, with our scale and access to markets. I met dozens of companies, especially in natural gas vehicle technologies; absorption chillers; and energy storage technologies, just to name a few.

Are you part of an energy start-up? If you want to share your idea with us, let me know!

A few members of the GE Team

But that’s not what my Lab Managers do. My Lab Managers do manage some non-technical issues, but they are also researchers. They know I expect them to be big thinkers in their spaces; that in conjunction with their research teams, I expect them to form bold visions, execute world-class research, and drive technologies into the hands of our customers.

With that as an expectation, I was thrilled to learn earlier this year that Eric was awarded the Lawrence Sperry Award, which was formally awarded today at the AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Texas. This award recognizes an early-career researcher for exemplary research accomplishments and impact, and Eric is a very worthy recipient. I met Eric on a recruiting trip at Virginia Tech some number of years ago, and recognized right away that he would be an excellent researcher and a strong leader. We kept in touch until he graduated, and was excited when he joined GE Global Research, working for one of my peers.

Eric and Sandra Magnus, the Executive Director of AIAA

Eric joined a team that does research on high-tech seals for turbomachinery. That was only peripherally related to his dissertation work, but we hire researchers more for their research talent than for the exact topic of their dissertation. Eric has great curiosity and learned about seals very quickly – both traits that we highly value in GE. As a result, he was made strong contributions very early in his career, and the next several years saw Eric innovate and impact product countless times. It is this body of work that won him that Lawrence Sperry Award.

I continued to follow Eric’s career at GE. When I had a need for someone to lead one of my heat transfer teams, I asked Eric to apply. Even though his background is not in heat transfer, I knew that Eric was very sound with engineering fundamentals, and I had seen him learn so fast on the Seals team, that I had full confidence he would be able to learn the heat transfer side and lead that team effectively. He continues in that role today and is getting deeper by the day in turbine heat transfer. I expect great things from Eric in the years to come.

So check out the press release below on Eric’s award, and join me in congratulating him. For those who are interested in careers at GE, Eric is a great example. His story shows how much we care about our researchers truly becoming “world class”, and the fact that we want our technical leaders to be real technologists.

Read the press release here

Less than 20 feet to my right is a CFM-56 jet engine, slung under the wing of a 737 taking me to Albuquerque, NM. The 737 is hands-down the most popular commercial aircraft on the planet, and since the CFM-56 is the only engine that powers the modern 737, it represents the most popular jet engine ever made.

My name is Todd Wetzel and I lead the Thermal Systems Organization at GE Global Research. My team of ~90 researchers in New York, Munich, and Bangalore, have a singular focus: bringing to life critical new heat transfer, thermal measurement, and thermodynamic cycle technologies for the full breadth of GE’s products.

That’s why when I look out at that engine pulling on the wing of my 737, I’m amazed at all of the thermal technology required to make it reliable, powerful, and efficient. To drive maximum efficiency, we burn the jet fuel so hot in the engine that, left to its own, it would melt and destroy every metal component in its path. But thanks to aggressive cooling technology, developed by hundreds of engineers over the last several decades, those parts survive masterfully, regularly carrying millions of passengers around the world safely from destination to destination.

But the CFM-56 isn’t my generation’s engine. Sure, my team is still active in research on current variants of that engine, but most of our efforts are pointed to the future. And the future is the LEAP.

The LEAP engine will power 100% of the next generation 737Max, and more than half of all Airbus A320neo’s. Over my lifetime, these two aircraft will be far and away the most common commercial aircraft on the planet. There will literally be more than a thousand  LEAP engines in the air every minute of every day during most of the rest of my life.

This is also the most technology-rich engine we’ve ever made. The LEAP will have 15% better fuel consumption than the workhorse CFM-56. Doing so requires even hotter gas temperatures, and stingier cooling. My team of researchers is extremely busy right now perfecting a range of cooling technologies to make that engine even more reliable, powerful, and efficient than its predecessor. Our labs are running just about every day, testing new cooling features. Our computers are running our most sophisticated CFD simulations ever. This time around, we are also developing advanced measurement technologies that will give us unprecedented detail on the temperatures in the LEAP engine.

As I sit in this plane typing away, the CFM-56 to my right just hums along, happy to do its job, unaware that a newer, younger pup is on its way!

But jet engine technology is just the tip of what my team does. The same skills required to cool a jet engine are also valuable for a range of products, including energy systems, electronics, and just about everything else GE makes.

I’m starting up this series of blogs to give a glimpse into my team, our technologies, and our technologists. You can get a jumpstart by checking out a few existing posts on other thermal technologies from my team, including:

- GE Scientists Employ Jet Engine Cooling Technology in Prototype LED Bulb
- The Future of Refueling
- GE Scientists Successfully Test World-Class Traction Motor For Electric Vehicles
- GE, INL researchers collaborate on waste heat efficiency research

And the list goes on and on.

I’ve got a great job: a brilliant team working on a wide range of thermal technologies for one of the biggest and most diverse technology companies in the world. Jet engines, gas turbines, optical diagnostics, LEDs, avionics, Rankine cycles, geothermal energy, concentrated solar power, compressed air energy storage, natural gas vehicles, healthcare equipment, biomass generators, fuel cells…I look forward to sharing it all with you.

Check back for more updates!

- Todd

We work directly with the Aviation engine designers in several ways, especially on the LeapX engine. One thing we do is develop new cooling features for the components in the engine.  In turbine cooling, that often means new internal heat transfer augmentation technologies, among other things.  My team does a lot of experimental testing of these new features to provide the evidence we need to deploy them in the engines optimally.

We also develop new ways of modeling turbines.  CFD – computational fluid dynamics – is a ubiquitous capability in our design process.  It’s easy to do a detailed simulation of a jet engine and get an answer that LOOKS good, but it takes an expert to get an answer that is RIGHT.  Ourteam spends a lot of time developing new modeling and simulation methodologies that are being used daily to simulate many regions in of the LeapX.

At some point we need to know if we got the design right, and that requires exotic measurement technologies.  Our team is constantly developing new measurement technologies that allow us to probe in an engine to get accurate measurements of performance, particularly with ever-increasing spatial density.  With the complexity of making these measurements in the hot, harsh environment on the inside of a jet engine, we need researchers who devote their careers to getting expert in relevant measurement technologies.

All of these technologies are hard, they require lots of resources and very bright scientists, but they are required to make an engine as sophisticated and as fuel efficient as the LEAP-X.   Stay tuned as we get closer to the flight test date for this engine.

Share this with your friends, peers, or anybody that you think would be interested in an exciting career working (with me!) at GE Global Research.  Anybody can register by visiting the Careers section on GE.com/research.

I’ve written in the past that there are a pile of GE products that have thermal challenges, and our research teams have no shortage of ideas for new thermal technologies to solve these problems. Heat pipes are one such example. A heat pipe is a device that, on the outside, looks like a rod or bar of copper, but appears to have a thermal conductivity that is several times higher than that of copper. But the heat pipe is hollow and on the inside it passively creates a fluid recirculation loop. The fluid is evaporated at the hot end of the heat pipe, travels along its length, re-condenses and the cold end, and then the liquid travels back to the hot side to start the process over again. The liquid carries the heat from one end to the other, and can do so much more efficiently than mere conduction through the solid copper walls. Heat pipes are very common in today’s electronics. In fact, practically every laptop has one or more heat pipes to distribute heat from CPU’s and GPU’s to the heat sinks elsewhere in the laptop.

Meanwhile, the cooling needs of electronics continues to escalate, and existing heat pipes have some limits. In response to these trends, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, put out a request for teams to develop an advanced Thermal Ground Plane, which in essence is a high performance planar heat pipe. GE was one of the teams selected to attempt to develop such a device.

So here’s what we are going to build. First of interest is the form factor. Most heat pipes are literally pipes, say 6 mm in diameter and a few inches long. But DARPA wanted something that looks more like a circuit board in size and scale. So we are attempting to build a heat pipe that is only 1 mm thick, but is up to 20 cm long. This is very thin! Maintaining structural integrity will be very challenging.

The other big requirement is that this device needs to be able to operate at up to 20 g’s. Depending on orientation, the g-forces can impede and even halt the flow of the liquid in a regular heat pipe, thus stopping the operation of the heat pipe and driving the temperature of the electronics through the roof. There are ways to make heat pipes work at high g’s, but then one must severely de-rate the amount of heat the heat pipe can carry. A major innovation was required.

One of the key points of innovation for this project is to leverage some of our recent advancements in nanotechnology. By carefully inventing and constructing special nano-sized features in various regions of the TGP, we believe we are going to set records for heat fluxes at high g’s.

The other thing that makes this project very daunting, but very fun, is the wide range of disciplines needed to successfully create the TGP device. A great thing about the GE Global Research Center is that we have just about every type of technologist available. So it is true that some of my thermal experts are working on this project, but they constitute only a fraction of the technologists. We’ve got a team of experts on computational heat transfer methodologies building a new suite of models to predict the performance of our TGP devices. We have chemists who are experts at fabricating new material technologies, and engineers who have devoted their research over the last several years to nano-scale multi-phase heat transfer. And we have packaging experts who are extremely knowledgeable at selecting substrate materials, bonding the TGP packages together, even how to interface the electronics to these devices in the future. Plus we have the pleasure of teaming with the University of Cincinnati and the Air Force Research Lab. The result is a diverse, world-class team of scientists who are tackling a truly hard problem. But when we succeed, you will see our TGP in a wide range of GE’s electronics products!

Basically, every physical product that GE sells – jet engines, power plants, locomotives, medical equipment, electronic equipment, appliances, etc. – is limited in some way by temperature. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and try me: send me any example of a GE product, and I’ll tell you how it is limited by temperature.

But many GE products are obvious in their thermal limitations. The best examples are jet engines, and their gas turbines cousins in power plants. In both of these machines, thermodynamics dictates that engine efficiency improves substantially as the temperature of combustion is increased. In contemporary jet engines, combustion temperatures are so high that even exotic metals could never survive if left to their own. Therefore, all components in the ‘hot gas path’, or the region downstream of the combustor, utilize sophisticated cooling technologies to allow these parts to survive the harsh, high temperature combustion gases they touch. For decades, researchers at GE have developed increasingly sophisticated cooling technologies to allow jet engines to be safer, more reliable, and more fuel efficient. (See picture of the jet engine blade with this entry)

Another area of research for my group is electronics cooling. GE has so many products that are steeped in electronics – Healthcare, Sensors, Lighting, Security, Appliances, even Energy and Aviation. In all cases, we work to develop advanced cooling technologies that allow our products to have superior performance over our competitors. That advantage might mean higher heat fluxes, more processing power, lower temperature, longer life – whatever the product designers and ultimately our customers need. Power electronics devices need amazingly high heat fluxes. We realized several years ago that this necessitated the development of liquid microchannel heat sinks. Microchannels have been known for 20 years to be capable of providing exceptional cooling heat fluxes, but they have been challenging to implement due to manufacturing issues, clogging, pressure drop, etc. Over the last three years our researchers have developed a new and patent-pending implementation of microchannel heat sink, which we believe is among the best in the world in achievable heat flux. We were invited to write an article for Power Electronics Technology, and our article was featured on the cover of the magazine!

Got any questions about thermal sciences at GE? Feel free to submit a comment on my blog.

-An array of advanced solar cells converting light into electricity;
-That electricity is used to drive an electrolyzer, which breaks water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas;
-The hydrogen and oxygen are sent to a fuel cell, which recombines them to create electricity;
-And the electricity is then sent to a simple fan, just so folks can see with their eyes that real power is being produced.

So as we were looking at this renewables display, we thought it would be great if we had a more “dynamic” end use for the electricity instead of the fan. We found the perfect toy hanging around our necks: our NextFest badges are made of clear plastic, and have a flashing green LED light embedded within. But to make the our fuel cells and solars cells power the LEDs, we had to “MacGyver” them a little bit. The LED required 4.5 volts, but our fuel cell only put out 1.5 volts. However, our solar cells were making 3 volts, so all we had to do was rewire them in series, and voila! Our solar cell/fuel cell combo was driving the LED. It’s in our nature to continue to want to one-up these kind of contraptions, so we kicked around the idea of in the future driving an iPod (hey, maybe we’d have it running our GE Podcasts, which you can check out at www.ge.com/ondemand…)

So generally, we are having a great time. It’s great getting around to see new technologies from so many other companies, but it’s even more fun telling folks about the great technologies we are working on at GE. The story practically tells itself!

If you’re at NextFest, stop by and say hi! See ya,

-Todd