We recently hosted a multi-day Battery Technology symposium here at GE Global Research that brought together technical experts, industry leaders, government officials, customers and suppliers interested in advancing energy storage technologies. The event explored market demand in the transportation and energy sectors, chemistry advancements, regulatory issues and the economics of mass adaptation of batteries as the world becomes more electrified.

We first started thinking about the idea of hosting a battery symposium earlier this year as a way to rally the numerous, rapidly growing activities within GE.  Our original idea was to run a purely technical conference to probe the state of technology and assess the opportunities for research advancement.  Of course that appealed to our scientists, but offered little distinction relative to any of the great technology conferences already out there.  That’s when we expanded our thoughts on what could be possible if we were to more broadly tap into our resources and connections, including business application developments, research efforts, investment activities, as well as existing partnerships and collaborations.  This expanded vision incorporated a real global perspective on energy trends, market drivers and application needs.

As you can see from the symposium agenda , we were able to pull together an all-star line-up of speakers and participants.  The result was a broad based discussion of critical political factors, economic forces, market drivers, and technical issues.  As interesting and insightful as the presentations and panel discussion were, the connections that were made over dinner, at the receptions, and during breaks were equally as valuable. 

Over the course of the event, terrific perspective and insight was offered on projections of explosive growth in this sector, the key factors that will affect the timing and magnitude of the developments, and the performance that will be demanded from battery technology to make it all happen.  This is an exciting time for the world, and certainly battery technology is an interesting growth area for GE. 

As a result of the Symposium we better understand the opportunities and challenges of working in this space.  For more information, including presentation copies from the event, click here for more information. We will continue to update the site content, including videos in the coming weeks.  Additionally, the event generated some great media coverage.  For a complete roundup of coverage, check out gereports.com. Click here for a direct link to the coverage.

Hello everyone, I have some exciting videos that I want to share with you! Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, we can finally capture the details of the water dancing on these amazing superhydrophobic surfaces. Together with Drs. Kripa Varanasi, Ming Hsu, Nitin Bhate, and other GRC colleagues, we discovered that even when the surfaces had the same contact angle for stationary water droplets, their ability to resist the wetting of impacting droplets could be totally different.  In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface (video 1),

partially lift off the surface (video 2),

or totally bounce off the surface (video 3).

Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off in video 3 - that’s what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface!  You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.

 Hi Everyone…

Well… I guess it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged - and as you might imagine we’ve made some terrific progress. In my first blog entry (back in Jan ‘06), I alluded to some testing we were doing with an eight-combustor version of a PDE integrated with a turbine. But you know what… I never told you what we found out! Needless to say, it turned out well… which is why we’re still investing in PDEs as a potential disruptive technology. How well did it turn out? Well, that set of experiments resulted in more than 8 conference papers and technical reports. And how about the rest of the PDE world? Well, you may have heard the exciting news that AFRL actually flew a PDE-powered small airplane at the end of January 2008. That’s right! Very exciting! So, it’s not exactly the futuristic “methane-misted PDE-powered airplane” that Dan Brown describes in his book “Deception Point”, but it is a huge leap forward for the PDE world.

Now, the PDE Turbine Interaction Program (PDE TIP) was a collaborative effort between GE and NASA that tested the first multi-tube PDC-turbine hybrid system. It consisted of eight unvalved tubes arranged in a can-annular configuration integrated with a single-stage axial turbine nominally rated for 10 lbm/s, 25000 RPM and 1000 hp. The system accumulated 145 minutes of operation including many runs of 5+ minutes for the rig to achieve thermal steady-state and for the turbine to attain constant speed. The rig was operated at frequencies up to 30 Hz (per tube) in different firing patterns using stoichiometric C2H4-air mixtures at conditions up to 8 lbm/s, 22000 RPM and 750 hp. Pretty impressive, eh?

By no means have we solved the major challenges. In fact, if anything, we raised a whole bunch of new questions!!! But that’s the whole point of research!! If it were easy, well, we wouldn’t be doing it. Aside from actually working in the first place (without falling apart), one of the key results showed significant attenuation of the pressure wave across the turbine. This strongly suggests that overall PDE-turbine hybrid engine noise would not be much louder than existing commercial engines. That’s a big deal since most people’s first reaction to hearing a PDE is “Wow… that’s loud”… well, so is driving your car without a muffler… and nobody really does that. Turns out that having components downstream of the PDE tubes acts a lot like a muffler - without really even trying to tune or optimize the design in any way. We also did more than just make sure it held together, but rather we instrumented the rig with strain gauges and we also quantified the rotordynamics to get a sense of the overall mechanical responses. We were happy to report that, although the mechanical response levels were higher than existing commercial engines, they were within the material strength limits. Of course, there’s still a lot of work to do in this area because we weren’t operating at the really high temperatures and pressures of true engine conditions. The rig also raised a lot of questions… so, we made our life a little bit easier by using a gaseous fuel as a surrogate for liquid Jet fuel… so how do you go about detonating liquid fuels? And what about the turbine design? Could we do a better job of it? Our experiments showed no change in turbine efficiency when fired under PDE mode as compared to its normal steady state mode (mind you, we had a fairly large uncertainty). This was quite a pleasant surprise since we had made no attempt to optimize the turbine - and the next time we do it, we’ll have to improve our measurement uncertainty.

So… we’re not exactly going to be flying on one of these in the immediate future… but, hey, the PDE TIP rig did give us great confidence in the future of the technology. It tackled a whole range of issues from operability to turbine performance to mechanical response and identified no insurmountable barriers. In that sense, the PDE TIP’s true value was in demonstrating the feasibility of the PDE-turbine hybrid concept. It’s what we call a “jugular experiment” the tough first experiment that says… “Yeah, this thing could work”, but with a lot of details that still need to be ironed out in future experiments!

Well… I’d better get going… we have some more “ironing” to do!

For women who have suffered from breast cancer, for those who faced the frightening prospect of having it and for anyone who has had someone close to them suffer and/or lose their life from this terrible disease, we ask … what can be done? What can be done to detect breast cancer earlier? What can be done to improve the treatment options and outcomes for patients? What can be done to beat this disease once and for all?

This month, we have featured a few of the projects my colleagues and I are working on to improve the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. I lead a team at GE Global Research that is working to develop advanced diagnostic tools that will enable the discovery of more biomarkers, or signatures of disease. This will change the way cancer is treated by tailoring treatments to the individual in a way that will maximize the effectiveness of that drug in getting rid of the cancer.

To conclude Breast Cancer Awareness month, I invite you to view a short video highlighting my team’s project to develop more personalized treatments for cancer patients. If you haven’t done so already, check out the videos my colleagues Kathy Bove, Cindy Landberg Davis, and Andrea Schmitz have put together on the projects they are working on in breast cancer prevention and treatment.

In the spirit of breast cancer awareness month, we wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the next generation of mammographic imaging, Digital Breast Tomosynthesis. Each year, over 3.3 Million women have their screening mammogram, and while it remains today the gold standard of breast cancer screening, there are still too many women with false positive findings, and unnecessary procedures. GRC is working hard to develop technologies that will help improve detection, reduce unnecessary biopsies, and provide doctors with a tool for treatment planning and decisions. Exploring Digital Breast Tomosynthesis, coupling the superior image quality of GE’s digital detector technology with GRC’s prototype system design and development expertise will allow us to help shape the future of breast imaging.

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!

We recently spent some time talking to the folks at Technology Review about our efforts to develop holographic data storage.  It was a great chance to explain how our technology works and how it is different from what other groups are doing.  They recently posted an article and a video podcast on their website.  We talk a little about the history of data storage at GE and then take a peek inside one of our research labs where we have our prototype holographic system running.  Check it out at: technology review article.

Answer:  Less than 1% of the Earth’s water is accessible freshwater (roughly 70% of the Earth’s surface is water). 

Globally we are at a point in history where the demand for fresh water is growing dramatically with rapidly growing population and industrialization. However, the water supply and the quality of that supply are actually decreasing.  By 2025 water scarcity could be a global crisis, with over 3 billion people in 40 different countries living in severely water scarce areas. Hi, my name is Dave Moore, and I work in the Membrane and Separation Technologies Lab (MSTL) at the Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. One of our main goals in MSTL is to develop new technologies that provide robust, inexpensive means to purify water.

In this video, I join Joe Suriano, who manages the Membrane and Separation Technologies Lab, and Hua Wang, a senior chemical engineer, who specializes in reverse osmosis membranes for water desalination. Our lab works with the Water, Energy, and Healthcare businesses to develop separation technologies across the entire filtration spectrum in applications from desalination membranes to municipal and industrial waste water purification to biopharmaceutical processing. Take a look at our video, where Joe, Hua, and I give you a flavor of the diverse membrane research in our lab, and the impact that it is having across a number of GE businesses, multiple industries, and the world.  Also, make sure you watch until the end to catch our nifty demo!  If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.  Enjoy!

In earlier posts on nanotechnology on this blog, we have looked at the potential of nanotechnology to enable new classes of materials. As more of these properties are established and refined in the laboratory, questions about transitioning these materials into a product become relevant. The transition from the lab to pilot scale production to full scale manufacturing is a common path walked by many new technologies, but nanomaterials provide some unique opportunities and challenges.

Nanotechnology truly entered the national consciousness and public policy with the establishment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000. A status report of the NNI observes that the years leading up to around 2005 were focused on fundamental research and “horizontal” multi-disciplinary R&D with relevance to multiple application areas. The report predicts that the next few years will see a shift in focus to “vertical” industrial areas.

Along a similar vein, a recent report [1] points out that nanotechnology represents a value chain and not an industry in itself. Thus nanotechnology is comparable to the interstate highway system and will add to the value proposition of all users that use the infrastructure. The report also postulates how nanotechnology could be exploited across industry value chains, from basic materials to intermediate products to final goods. The report presents separate forecasts by each value chain stage as well as by sector and region.  In 2014, it projects that 4% of general manufactured goods, 50% of electronics and IT products, and 16% of goods in healthcare and life sciences by revenue will incorporate emerging nanotechnology. The report [1] predicts that nanotechnology’s growth will occur in phases. In the first phase, nanotechnology is being incorporated selectively into high-end products. In 2004 revenues from products incorporating emerging nanotechnology was about $13 billion, $8.5 billion of which lies in automotive and aerospace applications. The report predicts that from 2010 onwards, nanotechnology will become commonplace in manufactured goods, with revenues rising to $2.6 trillion in 2014. Healthcare and life sciences applications will finally become significant in this period as nano-enabled pharmaceuticals and medical devices emerge from lengthy human trials.

However, not all attempts to make this transition are likely to succeed. In particular, it is unlikely that nanomaterials will dramatically alter the nature of a product or lead to a new product if an entire value chain from nanomaterial to end product has to be developed, since the time to market would probably be too long or the return on investment too low. Success is most likely in those areas where suitably tailored nanomaterials can be integrated seamlessly into an existing value chain while simultaneously preserving the benefits of the nanoengineered property.

A key question that policymakers, technologists and corporations need to address is the nanomanufacturing infrastructure that is needed to enable such a value chain. It is most likely that such an infrastructure will only be established when it is catalyzed at the national or international level. Several government agencies in the US are recognizing the need to transition the advances in nanoscience into commercial applications. The Industrial Technology Program of the Department of Energy recently organized a Nanomanufacturing for Energy Efficiency workshop to address some of these issues [2]. The pace of establishment of such a nanomanufacturing infrastructure is likely to be the key determinant on the magnitude of impact nanotechnology has in our daily lives.

[1] : http://www.luxresearchinc.com/press/RELEASE_SizingReport.pdf

[2] : http://www.bcsmain.com/mlists/files/NanoWorkshop_report.pdf

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!