The best hybrid cars can travel 50 miles on a gallon of gas. Could they go even farther? Why not, say engineers at GE Global Research. “We’ve built an electric motor that is substantially more powerful than what’s commercially available now,” says Ayman El-Refaie, electrical engineer at the research center’s electrical machines lab. “At the same time we can also improve fuel efficiency by up to 5 percent.”
General Electric Company (GE) has announced that it is halting construction of its Aurora, Colorado thin-film solar manufacturing plant for at least 18 months. The $300 million facility was planned to be the country’s largest solar factory. The decision is bad news for the construction workers attached to the project, but it is not necessarily bad news for GE.
Eight years ago, GE launched ecomagination to square population growth, natural resource scarcity and other looming global trends with sustainable economic expansion that helped the environment and made good business sense. “At GE we believe that innovation can solve the toughest environmental challenges,” says Mark Vachon, vice president of ecomagination. “Clean energy may go in and out of favor with policy makers. But our customers all want the same thing. They want to make their operations more efficient and productive.”
Checking machinery propped 300 feet high and buffeted by the weather can be tricky. Take wind turbines. An inspector in the field must brake the turbine, rotate the blades, and inspect and photograph any potential defects through a telescope. The process can take up to four hours.
Swiss company Schindler Group may not be a household name, but the 142-year old company is one of the world’s biggest elevator, escalator and moving walkway companies. Its products haul millions of people every day, and soon it will also move gigabytes of data.
A group of scientists were surprised recently when they trained a powerful new microscope on a colony of dangerous drug-resistant bacteria responsible for thousands of hospital-acquired infections and hundreds of deaths in the U.S. alone annually. They watched microbes from the family Pseudomonas aeruginosa blow themselves up and rain the contents of their cells on their nearby kin. The ejecta contained bits of cellular membrane, DNA, carbohydrates, proteins and other raw materials that the colony used like Lego blocks to grow the slimy biofilm that protected and nourished them.
This week we learned about scientists who built a seemingly immortal battery, a squadron of Air Force engineers and technicians who set the world speed record in magnetic levitation and a study that revealed where we store words in our brain.
GE Global Research is testing a desk-size turbine that could power a small town of about 10,000 homes. The unit is driven by “supercritical carbon dioxide,” which is in a state that at very high pressure and up to 700 °C exists as neither a liquid nor a gas. After the carbon dioxide passes through the turbine, it's cooled and then repressurized before returning for another pass.
Metal-cutting technology hasn’t changed a great deal in the last 60 years. Operators still clamp metal parts to the support bench and use drill bits or some other tools to achieve the desired shape. But a new breed of super-strong super-alloys is fighting back.
The intense heat generated during the machining of these next-generation materials can deform, chip and break ordinary cutters. “It is like slicing butter with butter,” says Michael Petracci, president of GE Ventures Licensing. “You won’t get very far.”
State Street Corp (STT.N) is nearing a deal to acquire General Electric Co's (GE.N) $115 billion asset management business, according to people familiar with the matter, as the U.S. industrial conglomerate continues to shed unloved assets.
