GE Global Research

Discussions in recent decades about climate change has raised awareness that we belong to a profoundly diverse global community. Not only do we operate in different societal structures according to different values, but we also have vastly different needs. The following is an inexhaustive list of needs that affect us in large numbers.

• Approximately 1.1 billion people have inadequate or irregular access to clean drinking water; 884 million people lack access to clean drinking water (Water scarcity was recently the topic of this continuing discussion.  The 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometer, but not piped to their dwellings, consume approximately 20 liters of water per day. In the United States, water consumption per capita is 600 liters per day, with toilet flushing accounting for 50 – 100 liters per day.
• Close to half of all people suffering at any given time have a health issue related to water and sanitation deficit. Nearly 1.4 million children die each year from lack of adequate water and sanitation.
• Approximately 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 per day, and nearly half the global population lives in abject poverty outside of commercial markets. The world’s richest quintile account for 76.6% of total private consumption.
• Rural areas account for three in every four people living on less than US$1 per day and a similar share of world hunger. Urbanization is, of course, not synonymous with human progress – urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth by a wide margin.
• One sixth of global population suffers from hunger and malnutrition, primarily in Asia, the Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
• There are 2.2 billion children on the planet, with 1.9 billion living in developing countries. There are 640 million children without adequate shelter, 400 million without access to clean drinking water, 270 million with no access to health services, and 121 million out of education.
• In developing countries, approximately 2.5 billion people are forced to rely on biomass – namely fuelwood, charcoal, and animal dung – to meet their energy needs for cooking. Eighty percent of the Sub-Saharan population and half of the Chinese and Indian populations use biomass for cooking.
• Indoor air pollution resulting from the burning of solid fuels for cooking claims 1.5 million lives each year, half of them under the age of five. Relying on biomass for fuel shortens workdays according to daylight. This form of “energy poverty” also forces women and children to collect fuel instead of allowing women to earn an income and children to pursue education.
• One quarter of humanity lives without electricity.
• Illiteracy plagues one billion people who are unable to read a book or sign their names.
• An estimated 2.6 billion people live without access to sanitation facilities, which hygienically separate human excreta from human contact. Recent decades have shown improvement, but there are still over 1.1 billion people who defecate in the open.

Addressing any item on this non-exhaustive list of pressing global issues requires financial investment. Money is not the only limiting factor, however. To put the financial need in perspective, the following table summarizes the sizes of some familiar regional and global markets.

These market sizes can be compared to estimates of additional costs required to achieve universal basic social services in developing countries (http://volunteernow.ca).

Such low cost estimates suggest that the services provided would be quite meager. But these estimates could be low by an order of magnitude and the message would still be clear that money is neither the only inhibitor nor the only enabler of solutions to global concerns.

Above chart on sanitation facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa can be found here.

Above chart on use of Asian sanitation facilities can be found here.

Above chart on challenges in drinking water can be found here.

Above chart on use of unimproved drinking water in Sub-Saharan African can be found here.

Above chart on poverty levels can be viewed here.

Hey everybody, I just wanted to share some photos and videos of an event that some of my colleagues, Dr. Margaret Blohm and Dr. Azar Alizadeh, participated in yesterday at Katharine Burr Blodgett (KBB) Elementary School in Schenectady, NY.

KBB Elementary was named after Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett, the first female researcher at the General Electric Company. Dr. Blodgett had a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge University and was actually the first woman to have ever achieved this! She also is the first woman to have received the American Chemical Society Garvan Medal. Dr. Katharine Blodgett’s contributions to science are still extremely relevant today. She worked on monomolecular coatings to cover surfaces such as water, metal, and glass and is the inventor of low-reflectance “invisible glass”. Therefore anybody who wears glasses or enjoys seeing clearly out their car windshield should be sure to give a special thanks to Dr. Blodgett!

Giving thanks to Dr. Blodgett is exactly what the students at Katharine Burr Blodgett did on Monday morning.  June 13th is the official Katharine Burr Blodgett Day in the city of Schenectady. To celebrate this, the school put together a special program for the students, including songs, inspirational speeches, science demonstrations, and a special guest speech from Dr. Katharine Gebbie, the niece of Dr. Katharine Burr Blodgett. The transcription of Dr. Gebbie’s speech about her aunt is below, which includes some very personal and interesting information about Dr. Blodgett.

I wanted to share this transcription with you, as well as some video of Margaret and Azar showing some nanotechnology demonstrations to the students at KBB. The video also features the students at KBB singing their very own Beagles anthem. Enjoy!

The sign outside of KBB:

Azar Alizadeh shows off some of GE Global Research’s nanotechnology demos:

Margaret Blohm (left outside) and Dr. Azar Alizadeh (right outside) with Dr. Katharine Gebbie and her sister Margaret, the nieces of Katharine Blodgett:

Katharine Blodgett’s niece, Dr. Gebbie, looks on as Azar talks to the students of KBB:

Showing how “magic” is really science:

Dr. Katharine Gebbie’s speech to KBB students:

It would have meant a great deal to our aunt Katharine to know that a school named after her was making learning such an exciting adventure for all of you. She was the first woman to join the research staff at the General Electric Company, the first woman to get a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge University and the first woman to receive the American Chemical Society’s prestigious Gervan award.

But more importantly to us, she was our favorite aunt. And whenever she used to visit us, which was about 3 times a year, she would always arrive with two suitcases. One that contained her clothes and one that had a lot of apparatus.  She would invite the neighborhood children in to join us to actually come and see the experiments she was doing. And we just loved her.  She treated us with all the respect she treated adults and other members of our family. And when she visited us in July in the summer months, she insisted that we be allowed to stay up beyond our bedtimes so she could tell us about the constellations and point them all out.

Maybe that was why I eventually became an astronomer, because of those first visits with her.

But let me go back to when she was very young. Her father was the head of the patent department at General Electric and he was involved in dealing with a lot of the most important patents of Edison’s. He was also shot and killed by a murderer five weeks before Aunt Katharine was born and this is one of the famous unsolved murders of the last century in the United States. Before he died he said to Katherine’s mother, you must put the children in an orphanage and go and find another husband. But he didn’t know my grandmother. She spent the rest of her live and devoted the rest of her life to supporting and educating her children.

Aunt Katharine was very smart, much smarter than I am. When she was two she taught herself to read. And she also had very much of the New England work ethic. She never missed a day of school her mother told us. Even when she had her tonsils out, the day of the operation she had her mother take her to school for 2 hours so she wouldn’t break her record. That was the way it was.

My grandmother took her children to Europe when they were very small because she felt the education was both better and less expensive in Europe. And every Sunday she would take them to see a cousin of theirs was recovering from tuberculosis and the first time she went there as a little girl, Katharine Blodgett saw a swing and it was the very first swing she had seen in her whole life. And she went running to her mother and asked could she have permission to swing on the swing, and her mother, this woman who wore black her whole life, said “Katharine, do you think the Lord would want you to swing on a Sunday?” And Katharine told us this story and she didn’t think it was fair at all. She didn’t mind not being able to swing but she didn’t think it was fair to be asked to decide what the lord would want and anyways, she couldn’t see how he would mind.

So, she came to work at the General Electric and Irving Langmuir convinced her to go to Cambridge and work with a very famous Ernest Rutherford for her Ph.D. in physics. And I quite recently discovered the first draft of a publication she did for her research and it began with a draft with the acknowledgements and it began “The writer at this time would like to say that her supervisor at this time was the greatest fool that she had ever met and that Sir Ernest Rutherford ignored his students more than he should be allowed to do. ” And now that, was naturally, not published, but I just thought that maybe some of you have sometimes felt that way, not about any teachers here of course, but maybe just at some time.

I am interested in her legacy, particularly both her professional and her personal legacy. Professionally, because the work that she did is still being sited 60-70 years later and that is quite a tribute to a scientist that the work that they did is still important. And personally because her grandnieces and nephew still remember her very well and appreciate and loved her and they have told us that we cannot come back from this wonderful event and a picture of the sign of the school and some pictures you to show to them. So I thank you very much for this wonderful opportunity to meet all of you and have a talk with some of you afterwards and please have a wonderful day.

Hi Folks,

Did you know, that manufactured materials such as the turbines that power our world, undergo a life cycle that begins at birth and ranges through peak performance to aging, decay, and expiry? Many things influence the life cycle of a material and one that I find very interesting to observe is the effect of therapy on materials.

Just as you and I may get fatigued in our daily life and seek rejuvenation through vacations, holidays or even short “spa” treatments, these materials regain most of their performance after a therapeutic treatment!

Take our superalloys that go into turbines, for example. After prolonged exposures at high temperatures, these superalloys show degradation in their performance with respect to their mechanical properties. This is because the microstructure responsible for the superior mechanical properties degrades during service due to high loads & temperatures. Signatures of the extent of damage are borne by “dislocations”, which are evidences that a material has been strained.
These situations call for a visit from the services team or “turbine-therapists”, if you will!

We look at the degraded microstructure & come up with a specific therapeutic treatment: for example,, a heat-treatment schedule designed to restore the finer details of the original microstructure. We assess the health with respect to microstructural damage & then expose the components to tailor-made treatments. These treatments are not only material-specific, but also component-specific, as different components in a gas turbine experience different temperature/stresses &/or have different alloy/coating compositions.

The result of these rejuvenation heat-treatments are experienced through reversal of the service-induced damage and thereby, an increased remaining life of this expensive hardware.

Hey everybody, it is Matt Gluesenkamp again.  With such a big to-do at the research center about the 50^th anniversary of the laser’s invention, I started thinking about how many movies out there show lasers being used in fantastical ways. From a bright red beam slowly moving to cut a bound-and-gagged spy in half (mostly possible) to a plane-mounted foot-thick laser popping a houseful of popcorn (not really going to work), there are a lot of myths and legends about lasers that Hollywood has generated or perpetuated over the years.

But perhaps the most well-known instance of “lasers” in cinema are the lightsabers from the Star Wars saga. I put quotes around “lasers” because the way lightsabers behave in these movies is quite a bit different from the way lasers behave in real life. So I wanted to take a look at these fictional devices, how they supposedly work in the Star Wars universe, and compare that to how they might work in our own, real, universe.

Pinning down the canonical inner workings of a lightsaber is tricky, but from browsing through the sometimes contradictory information on StarWars.com, Wookieepedia, and HowStuffWorks.com, I managed to glean what I thought was a pretty good breakdown. In the Star Wars universe, lightsabers are typically custom-built by Jedi and Sith warriors, but all have several common elements. Each has a power source, a lightsaber crystal, one or more focusing crystals, and a stabilizing emitter system. The power source is typically a diatium power cell, often with a capacity of several megawatt-hours. The lightsaber crystal converts the power cell’s energy into a plasma that is then passed through and directed by the focusing crystals. Finally, the emitter system stabilizes the plasma into a blade shape using a mix of power modulation and magnetic field containment.

Did that make sense to anyone? No? Good, then I’m not alone. Science fiction is typically a blend of materials and physical laws that do exist, and those that don’t. Although real-life battery technology is coming along great, we are a long way off from creating handheld batteries with capacities like that the ones found in the lightsaber’s diatium power cell. Perhaps the key lies in discovering this fictional diatium material?

Also, crystals do have many useful optical and piezoelectric properties but I don’t know of one that could magically create plasma from electricity. However, I read that the crystals must be “attuned to the Force” by a Jedi or Sith in a meditation ritual that can take days. So maybe we should start there.

Where the explanations of lightsaber technology get really convoluted is when they start talking about how the blade is shaped and contained. Magnetic fields are currently used to contain plasmas, but they are generated by machinery that must also surround it – Generating such a magnetic envelope from a single, unidirectional source would likely require some new laws of physics. There are also no crystals that can “direct” a plasma.

In fact, a plasma “being directed” by a crystal lens doesn’t make any physical sense anyway. A plasma is really just an ionized gas – a gas in which the electrons have been stripped from their atomic nuclei. We see plasmas all the time. They make up and are emitted from every star, like our solar wind and solar flares. The interaction of the solar wind with Earth’s magnetic field produces the aurora, or northern lights, another form of plasma. Plasmas are also the stuff of every spark and lightning bolt.

Although my specialty isn’t in plasma physics, I can very generally say that plasmas can be created by bringing gases up to a high energy level. The higher the energy, the more atoms will be stripped of their electrons, and the better quality plasma we will have. It’s completely possible that one could create a plasma by producing a large enough voltage difference, a la lightning, or a powerful enough laser focus. However, enormous amounts of energy are required with either of these approaches, and it would be extremely difficult to control the plasma’s shape. An electrical arc can have wild shifts in direction, and it can hardly be controlled without being surrounded by magnets. A laser will go in a straight line, but of course it doesn’t stop. A laser-based lightsaber would require a block or a couple of mirrors floating in midair, moving in sync with the hilt – which is of course largely impossible. On top of that, they would certainly melt in the presence of such a plasma anyway. Further, all of this is saying nothing about what the actual quality of the plasma would be and how reliably or quickly it would cut through objects.

So it seems quite impossible to create a lightsaber, as seen in the Star Wars films, using existing technologies, materials, and physical laws. But given the enthusiasm of Star Wars superfans out there, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are trying. Anyway, since I’m more of a nerd than a plasma physicist, I’ll pose this question to my colleagues: How do you think a real-life lightsaber could work?