Our team looked at all kinds of feedstock and processes to make jet fuel. The one oil I could get barrels of quickly was soybean (Edamamine). I will never forget sitting around the Christmas dinner table in 2007 and explaining to the family that I wanted to turn salad oil into jet fuel. Some of the questions included “why are they paying you?” and ” can you make my refrigerator produce gasoline while you are at it?” By the middle of 2008, the GRC team had figured out how to do it. We even ran a pilot plant for a few months to make ~150L of jet fuel. It was great!

But at Global Research, we don’t sit around waiting for the market to develop, we create the next great technology for our businesses. Glucosamine is a “health supplement” that was originally extracted from sea life; nowadays, cells have been manipulated to produce large quantities of glucosamine. There is no reason unicellular organisms cannot make the fuel of tomorrow. GE Global Research will work with partners to understand the fuel for the future out of whatever is available. So the future of fuels may seem unclear to many, but to me it is as clear as a Los Angeles sky after a winter rain.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve worked on great teams that have explored the feasibility of producing chemicals from biomass, modeled the economics of biofuel production technologies, designed a process that converts agricultural seed oils to jet fuel, and now I’m about to lead a project to demonstrate feeding coal/biomass mixtures at high pressure. This project addresses a key technical barrier to high efficiency biomass gasification. Gasification is a process that converts carbon-containing feedstocks to synthesis gas, which can be converted to fuels, chemicals, and electricity. By solving this feeding problem for biomass and coal/biomass mixtures, we will be one step closer to producing low carbon footprint fuels, chemicals, and electricity from domestically available feedstocks. My work at GRC is pretty exciting – I get to learn about cool technologies, work with really amazing scientists and engineers, and solve technical problems that can someday change the way we produce and use energy.

In addition to my technical role, I represent my organization on the Diversity Resource Council, (DRC). DRC is an employee organization at Global Research that works to raise awareness of employee diversity and helps identify opportunities for GE to be more receptive to that diversity. For example, the DRC played a role in establishing floating holidays and flex time at Global Research – to allow employees to observe holidays that are special to them and to adjust their work schedule to promote work/life balance. The Niskayuna site alone has employees from more than 55 different countries, and many of us work directly with GRC employees at our research centers in Shanghai, Munich, and Bangalore – so understanding and respecting diversity definitely helps us be more effective at our jobs.

Unlike the mainland United States, where almost 90% of our electricity is generated by natural gas, coal and nuclear energy, Hawaii significantly relies on imported fossil fuels for electricity generation. Since oil meets almost 90% of Hawaii’s energy needs, the State of Hawaii was significantly affected by the skyrocketing oil prices we witnessed in 2008. This reliance on imported oil translates into approximately $7B leaving the State economy each year to purchase fuel. Unlike the rest of the United States, the islands of Hawaii do not have natural gas pipeline networks, have no indigenous coal resources and the state forbids the use of nuclear power. At more than 31 cents per kWh, residents of Hawaii spend nearly three times as much on electricity as most Americans in the continental United States. The State is committed to driving its energy cost downward and reducing its dependence on imported oil. Early in 2008 the Department of Energy and the State of Hawaii established the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. The Initiative’s goal is for the state to meet 70 percent of its energy needs with clean energy sources by 2030.

To reach very high levels of renewable energy, Hawaii will leverage its impressive wind and solar profiles by deploying wind and solar power. Integrating very high percentages of these variable renewable energy sources does not come without challenges, particularly on islanded power systems that are not well interconnected to larger grids that can import or export imbalances in generation. Unlike traditional power sources that are predictable, utilities have no control over when the wind blows or when the sun shines. Imagine the challenge of meeting peak energy when the wind suddenly calms and other generation is needed to fill in the gap.

One of the many programs our team is working on in Hawaii is the Oahu Wind Integration Study. As part of this program our team will be assessing the challenges of integrating up to 400 MW of wind power on the Oahu grid, delivered to Oahu via undersea cable from the islands of Molokai and Lanai, each located more than 20 miles from the island of Oahu. Our team is building power systems models of the island of Oahu that will be used to simulate these wind projects and assess the technical and economic performance of various technologies, such as energy storage, advanced wind power plant controls, and other system-level controls, that could be deployed to address the day-to-day system operating challenges associated with very high levels of wind and solar power.

We are working very closely with the Operations and Planning teams at the Hawaiian Electric Company to ensure our study can help achieve the objective of increasing the content of renewable energy in the Hawaii power system in a way that is acceptable and realistic to the folks that maintain, operate and perform long-term planning for the power system. By addressing the challenges of integrating record-levels of wind and solar power, GE can start down the path of technology development for wind turbines, gas turbines, and transmission and distribution system products that can help the power system accept very high levels of renewable energy.

I work in the Prediction Algorithms Lab at the John F. Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore, India. This week I participated in a GE Money-sponsored symposium on microfinance in London, as part of FINCA International’s launch in the UK, FINCA has been a key player in the microfinance world for almost 25 years, providing financial services to the world’s lowest-income entrepreneurs, particularly women. FINCA is also GE Money’s partner under the Banking on Womenâ„¢ program, which seeks to empower the world’s women with financial knowledge, entrepreneurial training and access to microfinancing opportunities through its unique partnership with FINCA.

At the symposium, titled “Microfinance-Collaborating for Change”, I shared the results of a research pilot our team has been working on. We are collaborating with microfinance institutions (MFIs) in India, trying to infuse operational excellence into their loan process through innovative technology. Currently, we are conducting a research pilot with Ajiwika, a small MFI operating in rural Eastern India. The majority of their customers are women from remote villages living in extreme poverty. Similar to other MFIs like FINCA, their operations can be divided at three levels: field operations, operations at the branch and HQ operations. We selected one problem from each of these operations for our first phase of the research pilot:

1. The field operation constitutes two parts: one where the agents talk to potential customers, arrange awareness sessions for them and form groups. The other part is where the agents conduct transactions, answer customer queries regarding their existing loans, like “Current outstanding, Next due date”, etc. We designed and deployed a low-cost customized device to help the agents perform these activities in a more efficient and error-free way. With the use of this device in the pilot, the efficiency of the agents has increased by around 150% and they can now take care of more groups.

2. Operations at the branch: The branch manager (BM) needs to appraise loan applications. The appraisal process here differs from that of a bank because the information provided might not be as sophisticated as that of a regular banking customer. Contrary to the instant appraisal and loan disbursement process of a regular bank, the process in the MFI is manual and a bit more time-consuming. So we asked ourselves, can we come up with a system that provides a faster loan appraisal process? If so, can we make it somewhat decentralized, where the agents can do the appraisal for smaller loans in the field itself?

We came up with an approach! We have designed and test-deployed a system that learns the BM’s decision-making process and mimics it in future appraisals. The current impact is that the BM can now appraise the loan applications of 10-12 groups compared to 3-4 groups it took prior to conducting the pilot. The long-term benefit is that the system can also be used by the agents to appraise smaller-amount loans in the field itself (if allowed by the MFI).

3. HQ operations: As an MFI grows, it needs to have a system to control its branches. Due to a lack of infrastructure in remote areas, the Internet is not an option. So, we have installed a system in the branches that helps HQ to intervene and control the branches at appropriate times using limited mobile connectivity.

What is really exciting about this technology is that this project is a great example of how we are taking global technology and finding innovative ways to localize it to meet the needs of rural India. Well, we’d better get back to work. We still have much to do as we enter Phase II of the pilot. We’ll keep you posted on future developments as we move forward!

Hello Earth! I am very excited to share our results on the development of new general battery-free radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensing platform that selectively detects multiple individual chemicals with a single sensor.

Chemical sensing based on responsive materials goes back to times when the Romans used papyrus impregnated with an extract of acorns for selective colorimetric determinations of iron sulfate and copper sulfate and times when Lewis used litmus paper for detection of acids and alkalis in the late 18th century. In modern times, many types of chemical and biological sensors exist that involve electronic, optical, thermal, gravimetric, and other methods of sensing.

One of the most important parameters of sensor’s performance is its selectivity. There are many applications where sensors should be very selective because the quality of its signal is critical for further decision-making. Highly selective sensors are needed to detect pathogenic bacteria in water, the presence of many harmless species, to detect very low concentrations of toxic fumes in indoor and outdoor air in presence of many other odors, and to detect food spoilage or contamination. For these and many other reasons, existing sensors need a significant improvement in their selectivity.

I have realized that existing wireless sensors do have a significant deficiency of selectivity in their response. To solve this problem, I focused our diverse team of scientists such as analytical chemists, RF engineers, polymer scientists, and microfabrication engineers on conventional passive RFID tags that already have many but not all capabilities for performing chemical and biological sensing. As a result of our work, the technical innovation in our sensor development leverages a ubiquitous concept of asset tracking with conventional battery-free (passive) RFID tags and allows these tags to serve also as reliable and cost effective selective chemical and biological sensors.

The accomplishments of our team in RFID sensing are in the area of detection of toxic gases such as toxic industrial chemicals (TICs), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and chemicals and bacteria in liquids. In gas-detection applications, the presence of uncontrolled amounts of water vapor in air is the biggest practical challenge for existing sensors because of the many orders of magnitude concentration difference between water vapor and gases of interest in air. The team developed these RFID sensors that overcome this critical limitation of existing sensors. These new RFID sensors detect trace concentrations of toxic gases in the presence of variable levels of relative humidity in air. The proper combination of antenna geometry and a sensing material on top of the antenna resulted in the achieved detection limit of toxic gases down to ~ 100 part per billion concentration. Detection of chemicals in liquids as well as measurements of several physical parameters is under development for applications where the low cost of these sensors and its battery-free operation are critical to making these sensors disposable. Bacterial growth detection has been demonstrated with biological RFID sensors.

This RFID sensors technology will enable capability for mass production of cost-effective sensors; detection selectivity in the presence of background interferences; zero power consumption; and implementation of a well-organized method of tracking sensor distribution over large areas and in large numbers. These passive, battery free RFID sensors are attractive when there is a need for the smallest sensor size, when a sensor is deployed for a long-term application, when a high power RF transmission is prohibited (e.g. on the manufacturing floor, in hospitals), or when the sensor should be low cost for disposable applications. These finding could lead to the design and manufacture of such RFID sensors for diverse chemical and biological detection applications ranging from healthcare, to security, food packaging, and pollution prevention.

Stay tuned for more news from GE Research!

Hi everyone! I’m a third year EEDP and I will be taking over Jon Jansen’s role as the Edison rep on the blog. A quick refresher. The Edison Engineering Development program is a program that GE offers for early engineers. You work full-time with the company while taking supplementary course work and leadership training. You also do three to four rotations to experience working with various technology areas. It’s a great program!

Currently, I’m in my last rotation and am working on fiber optic sensors for temperature, strain, and combustible gas sensing. Fiber sensors are great because many sensors can be incorporated into a single fiber, which minimizes the number of wires needed in a typical monitoring system. You can also use a single fiber to monitor different measurements such as temperature and strain. If you are thinking, “why not just use thermocouples and foil strain gages?” think again.

In-situ monitoring of large equipment such as power generators and wind turbines may need tens to hundreds of measurement points. For example, we are currently looking into using fiber optic cable to measure the temperature inside an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC, a.k.a Clean Coal) plant. Because the IGCC radiant syngas cooler is more than 100 feet, it would take hundreds of thermocouples to measure the temperature profile along the cooler. Fiber optic sensors require fewer wires than thermocouples, which means that at the same cost, we can have more measurement points, and more measurement points give us more accurate monitoring of the entire system! Optical fibers are also immune to electromagnetic interference, an added bonus.

GE businesses such as Energy, Aviation, and Healthcare are interested in using fiber optic sensors to improve their monitoring systems. Although commercially available fiber sensors can be used for some applications, some of our applications require high temperature operation and special packaging. We are working on unique technology developed at GRC to fit these specific applications.. There is much potential in the technology and its impact to our business. It’s all very exciting!

Click on the picture at left to access video, in which I personally take you on tour of our research center in Munich. You’ll see some of our labs, and I’ll introduce you to a few of my colleagues who are working on many diverse projects. Our research center consists of six labs, focused on renewable energy technologies, such as wind and solar power, zero-emission technologies but also in more conventional types of energy generation such as oil and gas. Additionally, there are labs dedicated to healthcare technologies, composite manufacturing materials and sensors for security and medical systems.

The center opened in June 2004 and is located on the campus of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), one of the top three universities in Germany. The center currently employs 100 scientists and technicians. We have a great international atmosphere, being a workplace for people from over 25 different nationalities. Enjoy the tour through the labs and don’t hesitate to contact us or visit us if you are in the area.

Consider a campus, with multiple buildings that are currently served with electricity from the local utility, utilizing natural gas through a boiler system for heat generation. The yearly operating cost of this campus includes electricity costs, natural gas costs and maintenance costs and is represented with the red line. Our study then evaluates the transformation of the campus to a Microgrid with an on-site Combined Heat and Power (CHP) facility that generates both electricity and heat.

This CHP system is grid-connected, and allowed to purchase electricity from the utility using a real-time pricing structure. This means the utility at this location allows the electricity price to vary during the day. Our advanced energy management technology then determines when to make electricity and heat locally, versus buying from the utility and Gas Company when rates are advantageous. The operating cost of the Microgrid system is shown in green, and demonstrates greater than 40% reduction from the current operating mode, made possible by the high efficiency of the CHP system and the benefits of participating in the local electricity market.

Transportation in the US uses about 75% of the oil consumed annually. That’s about 15 MILLION barrels each DAY and almost 20% of the world’s total oil production! (1) http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/pdf/trend_4.pdf.

GE has been working with electric and hybrid vehicles for 30 years. It’s a great fit with our expertise in motors, controls and energy management. From trucks to buses and locos, the biggest challenge to hybridize is not necessarily technological: we have fuel cells, batteries, ultracapcitors, and motors that work – demonstration vehicles are on the streets today. The challenge is economics.

We’re looking at new ideas to get fuel savings with fewer batteries and less hardware. GE’s next big project is working with the Federal Transit Authority to build a prototype fuel cell bus using new components that greatly reduce the demand on the Ballard PEM fuel cell and recover braking energy using A123 Systems lithium-ion batteries.

Recently, Senator Hillary Clinton came to visit the Global Research facility and her first tour stop was to my FTA fuel cell bus project (see picture with this entry). I showed off our 1996 bus that will be turned into a rolling laboratory as the first phase and talked about our objectives and approach. I was impressed by her engagement and sincere interest in our work. We also discussed the economic and technical challenges behind fuel cell vehicles and she agreed that government cost share programs are keys to bringing advanced energy technologies to consumers.

I love working with technology that is going to make a difference in the world. Hybrids will enable us to get short-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reduce oil dependency, but the technology developed also supports the long-range goals of plug-in hybrids, hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles. And, if you’re afraid of not being able to buy a fast “alternative future car”, join me and start saving your money for a new Tesla.

-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

They all represent a unique merger of structure, form and function. These natural and man made structures rely on an exquisite control of materials internal structure, often referred to as the micro- or nanostructure of the material, to achieve their function.

The seashell is made of calcium carbonate, the same material that chalk is made of. However, in the seashell, the calcium carbonate is packed in the form of a ‘brick and mortar’ structure with the calcium carbonate, forming the bricks and a thin polymer layer forming the mortar. Any crack that forms in this complex architecture is diffused along a complex, tortuous path absorbing a lot of energy and making the shell resistant to catastrophic failure. In the absence of such an architecture, calcium carbonate that forms chalk breaks easily.

In the case of the lotus leaf, the surface of the leaf sheds water and is thus classified as superhydrophobic. The key reason for this effect is the present of textures on the surface, at multiple length scales, from nano to micro.

The human skin is an excellent example of a multi-functional material, which can act as a barrier layer, as a deformable protective and self-healing layer, a heat regulatory mechanism among other functions. This is because the skin is a complex composite material whose components have been carefully put together to seamlessly perform these functions.

The evolution of the jet engine of today owes a lot to the development of unique metallic and ceramic materials that can function in the hot and harsh environments present in the engine’s combustion environment, while maintaining the highest levels of structural integrity.

The digital revolution has relied heavily on our ability to make ultrapure silicon, with very few defects.

Even though the examples cited above all rely on control of material structure, there are a few fundamental differences. It is these differences that make nanomaterials so exciting and their potential so large. This is especially true when nanotechnology is applied to traditional materials, such as metals and ceramics. Over the past two decades, my research has focused on making metals and ceramics with better mechanical, physical or chemical properties and we are now beginning to use the tools of nanotechnology to make these materials dramatically better.

One key difference between most engineered and natural materials is what has been referred to as a ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottoms-up’ approach. Traditionally, new materials have been developed by taking the material available in the earth’s crust, extracting the needed substance (like iron), usually mixing them with other materials and then shaping the material into its final form, typically at high temperatures. In fact, human progress over the centuries has often been based on our mastery over materials, so much so that from the stone age to the iron age to the age of silicon, time has been marked by the type of materials that dominated the world at that point of time. The major advantages of this approach is the ability to produce materials and systems with a remarkable degree of repeatability and consistency, in large numbers where needed and using these economies of scale to drive down costs.

Natural materials, on the other hand are made typically by putting the right material at the right place at the right time, through a process that is often referred to as self-assembly. It is this process that enables natural materials to have an exquisite control of the materials microarchitecture.

We are now beginning to see the convergence of materials science with biology, and new methods to synthesize, manipulate, order and visualize materials at near atomic scales are beginning to emerge. The challenge from an industrial perspective is to translate these scientific innovations to productive and cost-effective technology. Towards this goal, we are working on developing methods to self-assemble ceramics, but unlike fundamental research in this area, a key metric we use to judge the process is scalability. A second difference is that, unlike the calcium carbonate that is self assembled by nature, GE’s interest is in self assembling ceramics that are capable of performing in the harsh environments of a jet engine or a gas turbine. Like the proteins and ceramic precursors that nature uses, a ‘toolkit’ for such self-assembly needs to be developed, especially for non-oxide ceramics such as nitrides and carbides.

We are using block copolymers and ceramic precursors to do such self-assembly. The protocol starts with the self-assembly of a polymeric ceramic precursor into an ordered structure, using an amphiphilic block copolymer as a template. This ordered nanostructure is stabilized via cross-linking of the precursor in order to endure subsequent high-temperature processing without undergoing an order-to-disorder transformation. Controlled pyrolysis is then performed in such a way that the ordered structure is conserved while pores are eliminated during the decomposition of block copolymer and the ceramization of the polymeric precursor. The end result of this process is an ordered, high density, nanostructured ceramic with silicon carbonitride as the major component.

For further details refer to our recent publication.

Current GE clean-coal technologies produce fewer emissions than oil-fired power plants. In this technology, known as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), the coal is used to create a gas mixture containing hydrogen, known as Syngas, which is used as the fuel for the gas turbine. IGCC is already in use in the United States. At GE, we are continuing to work on ways to further reduce emissions.

I am the Lab Manager of the Combustion Lab at GE Global Research, which is developing new combustion technologies to be used in IGCC power plants. The experiments supporting this research are being performed in the combustion technology development labs at Global Research. In this facility, we can match gas turbine combustor conditions and evaluate the performance of hardware and new concepts. The team at GRC is currently working on two programs sponsored by the US Department of Energy to examine the performance of new Syngas-based combustion systems.

Recently, New York Governor George Pataki visited our facility to learn more about GE’s research in cleaner coal and other key energy technologies.

The picture at left is of the Governor and me in one of our combustion technology development labs, looking at one of our experiment test stands.

In addition to the cleaner coal programs, the Combustion Lab at GRC is working with GE Aviation and Energy in the development of new combustion technologies for power generation and propulsion gas turbines.