As part of my new role in therapy, one application that the GE-GRC team is looking at is optical imaging for surgical procedure guidance. Kathy Bove in her blog has introduced this great new technology. We have developed a NIR-fluorescence imaging system. When used in conjunction with fluorescence contrast agents it allows a surgeon to simultaneously see surgical anatomy and NIR fluorescence in real-time. If you would like to know more, Siavash Yazdanfar recently wrote an article along with our collaborator John Frangioni from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center , Boston, MA about this project.

It’s been a while since the last blog entry for we c…green but it doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy! Just a refresher, we c…green is an employee initiated group at GE Global Research that kicked off in May 2007. Our mission is to help employees minimize their ecological footprint at home, at work, and in the community. We’ve organized many high impact events in 2007 such as a trip to Fenner Wind Farm (outside of Syracuse, NY), Alternative Transportation Week, Local Harvest Dinner, and Green Car Show and Hybrid Test drives.

In 2008, we started off the year by inviting a local farmer to talk to us about the benefits of local food and joining a CSA (community supported agriculture). We c…green members (particularly Maria Latorre) also worked to include GRC as a drop-off location for the weekly vegetable deliveries– both for convenience and to eliminate employees having to drive extra miles to pick up their shares.

We’ve also made progress on the recycling front. During a four-month period, more than 2500 bottles were collected by a volunteer task force and prevented from going to landfills. Through our “Green Cafeteria” initiative, we replaced plastic utensils with reusable ones, thereby preventing 336,000 plastic utensils - the estimated 2007 usage on site - from entering the landfill. Additionally, styrofoam plates, which numbered 119,000 in 2007, have been replaced with biodegradable plates. Other efforts included recycling Styrofoam packing materials and plastic bags in which lab coats and other garments are delivered.

For the second consecutive year, the we c…green ecology team spearheaded an Earth Day effort with the Eastern New York Nature Conservancy to help restore the habitat of the federally endangered Karner Blue Butterfly. Thirty-five GE Volunteers planted four pounds of lupine seeds, which will grow into the food source for the Karner Blue Butterfly caterpillars.  We c…green members also removed refuse and cleared trails at the 100-acre Indian Kill Preserve for the Schenectady County Nature Preserve the. The Preserve follows the banks and bluffs of the Indian Kill and encompasses a diverse number of habitats including native hardwood forest, conifer plantations, and wetlands.

We just had our second annual GRC-wide event, “we c…greenathon”. For each day of the week of June 23-27^th, we focused on a different initiative, recycling, ecology, transportation, and eco@work. We also had an interactive display of the EPA’s carbon calculator for employees to calculate their household carbon consumption. On recycling day, we gave away reusable shopping bags and information on recycling centers within their county. Ecology day showcased efforts of the “Green Cafeteria” and solicited volunteers for the upcoming GRC employee farmers market. On Eco@work day, our facilities team showed our current energy consumption breakdown and future plan for adopting renewable energy at GRC On transportation day, we show-cased 9 employee’s green cars, including four hybrids and a truck running home-made biodiesel. They also test drove a Saturn Vue, a Toyota Prius, and a Nissan Altima Hybrid. Check out the picture from this year’s green car show.

Just as last year, we had an idea wall where employees could post their thoughts on how to be more eco-friendly. In exchange, the idea generator got a reusable mug, which will get them a discount for drinks at the cafeteria. We had ideas ranging from work 4 ten hours days to harvesting energy from breathing. We also raffled off a compact fluorescent 3-pack, a programmable thermostat, a battery charger with rechargeable batteries, and the book “Green Remodeling” by John D. Wagner. Needless to say, the greenathon was a great success where we generated a lot of interest in the employees and collected potentially high impact ideas that may help the planet now and in the future. At GE Global Research, we not only develop products that help the environment, we also use our imagination to create a more sustainable way of living. We c….green, what do you see?

In the days leading up to the cricket challenge match with GE Energy, I find that the ten-day and hour-by-hour weather forecasts suddenly take on critical importance. With this being the third annual challenge with our GE neighbors in the adjacent town, the planning runs pretty much like clockwork now, with bad weather as the only potential obstacle. The British are famous for constantly talking about the weather, so this event helps me get back to my roots!

 We knew it would be difficult to retain the trophy after losing two of our key players from 2007, one of whom was rubbing salt into our wounds by lining up against us this year. But our hopes of victory were buoyed by the addition of several good new players. I think I like our new hiring strategy.

 The typical crowd for the cricket matches I played in Scotland only very rarely made it into double-figures, so it really adds to the occasion when you arrive at the game to see tents, commentators and enough spectators to warrant the word crowd. And there were even pre-match introductions. Makes you feel like a star… very briefly.

Our match was scheduled for a maximum of 25 overs (comprising of six balls, or pitches) per side, or until all of the batsmen are out. Just as a calibration, last year the game was very close with both teams just crossing the century mark (I know it sounds like a lot when you’re used to baseball).

Energy batted first, but we got off to a good start, restricting them to just 47 runs at the halfway mark, having already dismissed four of their batsmen. What followed was a blur. Our former colleague Rohinton started the onslaught, which was prolonged (and then prolonged) by Energy captain Mofeez for a final score of 185. Cricket is unique in many ways, none more so than that it is generally not clear who is winning until the end. That was certainly not true in this case!

Facing such a large total took the pressure off and allowed us to adopt a free flowing, attacking approach. Or, at least, that’s what we told ourselves! But Energy quickly squashed any excess optimism with a devastating opening spell collecting two early wickets for just four runs. Vikas, visiting from Bangalore, turned the tide with a flurry of sixes to bring cheers from the previously silent GRC section of the crowd. Even when he was out, the momentum carried to the following batsmen. We attacked until the end, but unfortunately fell 12 runs short of our target.

 It was disappointing to lose, especially when it felt like we had gained control of the game towards the end. However, it was a fantastic match and event to be part of and I feel confident that we’ll bounce back. And most importantly, the event was, once again, a tremendous success; I think the best so far in terms of excitement of the games, number of spectators… and of course the weather!

 So, check out our short video highlighting the great action of the day.

Global warming. Carbon footprint. Life cycle assessment. As environmental awareness continues to increase, many businesses are developing proactive environmental initiatives that go well beyond compliance. Here at GE Global Research we are doing our part by building ecoassessment expertise that helps GE product designers develop environmentally-responsible products and services. And we are very excited about it!

The first question that needs to be addressed when designing a new product or service is “What is Green?” How does one go about identifying and prioritizing opportunities for environmentally-responsible product design? Is it energy efficiency? Water efficiency? Recyclability? Renewable materials? All of the above? How does one identify the best designs for a particular product or service that result in the lowest overall environmental impact? One tool that we are using is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a method to systematically evaluate the “cradle-to-grave” environmental impacts of a product or service through all stages of its life cycle, from raw materials extraction to manufacturing, distribution, use, and eventual disposal or recycling. LCA is one of the few tools that can credibly help answer the question “What is Green?”   LCA methodologies have been evolving since the 1990’s and continue to evolve as we speak. Performing an LCA study is technically demanding yet very satisfying, in that the results are not always intuitively obvious! There are lessons to be learned here by digging deep and performing a thorough assessment before drawing conclusions!

Carbon footprint is a related topic that is in the news a lot these days, particularly due to increasing concern about the threat of global warming. What is it? There are many different definitions out there. Here’s a simple definition that I like: Carbon footprint refers to the total greenhouse gas emissions associated with a product throughout it’s entire life cycle, and is usually expressed as grams (or kilograms) of carbon dioxide equivalents. Sound familiar? It should… carbon footprint is basically an LCA focused on greenhouse gas emissions. Simple in concept, but technically challenging to calculate correctly.

So how do I get to do this cool stuff? I lead the Ecoassessment Center of Excellence here at Global Research. We focus on comprehensive technical expertise encompassing the areas of LCA, carbon footprinting, human health risk assessment, and fate & transport of materials in the environment. We support the GE businesses, our research colleagues, and GE Corporate Environmental Programs as the company continues to develop eco-responsible products, processes and services. These are exciting times, and we are seeing substantial traction with proactive environmental initiatives that go well beyond compliance. The coolest thing here, if I can have a small impact within GE, that can translate to a big impact on the world since GE’s products impact so many aspects of society including energy production, water purification, medical equipment, and aircraft engines, to name just a few!

GE Global Research is working to develop solar energy systems solutions to provide clean renewable energy to the world. To deliver a high quality, optimized solution, intensive testing is needed. At our research facility in Munich, we have set up two test stands: an indoor solar simulator for up to 2m x 2.5m solar modules and an outdoor test stand for fixed mounted solar generators and tracked systems.

The indoor simulator allows us to test and qualify modules under very tightly controlled light conditions up to 1200 W/m². Though the simulator, we can understand the system performance impact over a wide range of light conditions from a full sunny day to diffuse light that could occur from snow or a lake surface or cloud scattering. This test stand allows us to proceed faster with developments and conduct more experiments under precise scientific conditions.

The outdoor simulator gives us the “hard” reality data under real environmental conditions. This allows GE to understand the long-term environmental impact on solar modules.

We recently had the pleasure of meeting with Kevin Hall, a reporter with McClatchy Newspapers, to highlight some of our efforts new battery development.  Click here for the a link to the article.

In his story, Kevin does a great job of conveying the momentum that is growing around the hybridization and electrification of transportation.  As he mentions in the article our scientists are inspired scientifically and motivated by market pull to bring technically feasible and economical viable battery solutions to the table.  It was a real pleasure to have Kevin tour our electrochemistry laboratories, allowing us to show-off the great progress we’ve made.  Here’s a picture of me (on the right) and our sodium-metal-halide battery program leader, Chuck Iacovangelo, in our battery test facility.

Given the historical shortcomings of batteries that are often sited as standing in the way of large-scale commercial introduction and adoption of hybrid and electric vehicles, many folks are asking the same vital questions about performance, reliability, safety, and cost.  These questions are the most critical and are exactly the ones our team targets in battery technology research.  We’ve made breakthroughs in advancing sodium-metal-halide battery technology against these criteria and working hard to use this type of energy storage to develop a Hybrid Locomotive.  Stay tuned to hear more about our impact on this and other industries where GE has a strong presence.

Hey everyone. We just came out with some exciting news yesterday about the formation of a new business that is going to revolutionize the world of pathology, and it all started in GE’s Research Lab. About four years ago, we started a small program with some seed money to explore the potential for digitizing pathology slides. We had already done it for X-ray. Why not pathology? So we visited some pathology labs to learn more about how pathologists do their work. Pretty soon, we realized that we are on to something big. But we also realized that something was missing. When it comes to diagnostic imaging, GE is the best. We have been doing it for nearly 100 years since the invention of the Coolidge X-ray tube. But we need to complement our expertise with expertise in pathology. Fortunately, we linked up with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) - one of the world’s foremost center’s for the study of pathology.

Four years after we started, we have taken an idea and created a whole new business with UPMC. It’s the first time in GE’s history that we formed a company with an academic institution. I can’t believe it. As a scientist, you always dream about taking a great idea in the lab and seeing it make a difference in the world. Having a company result from your team’s research in the lab? It doesn’t get any better than this.

What’s amazing is that pathologists have essentially been studying slides the same way it has been done for more than 125 years ago back in the 19th century. You looked at tissues samples on a slide under a microscope. We thought it was about time to bring this practice into the digital age. Now, I should point out that pathologists work with stunning speed and precision to make diagnoses today. But just think what we could do if we could give them better technologies, better tools and more value-added information with which to study. That’s what this new company is all about.

We want to take the prototype digital pathology scanner developed in GE’s Research Lab and take it to market. You may ask, what will this all mean? How will a digitized world of pathology be better than what exists today? It will be better for lots of reasons.

Today, pathologists can look at one protein or biomarker on one slide and bascially tell a patient whether they have or don’t have cancer. In a digital pathology-enabled world, we want to enable pathologists to look at slides on a computer screen that may contains 10s, even 100s of proteins or biomarkers on one slide. We want pathologists to have information that will not only tell them whether someone has cancer; we want that slide to tell them what type of cancer and how it will likely behave. Most importantly, we want to provide enough information for doctors to tailor therapies in a more personalized way. And instead of storing thousands of glass slides in warehouses and having to ship them by truck or plane between doctors for consultations, we want to enable instantaneous file sharing and virtual consultation online.

When you look further out into the future, digital pathology has the potential to enable the next wave of disease detection in molecular medicine. The added knowledge we can acquire about new biomarkers and an individual’s biochemical composition could enable doctors to identify whether patients are predisposed to certain types of disease and how patients will respond to certain treatments. This knowledge could be especially useful in developing more targeted drug therapies that can be tailored to a patient based on their genetic makeup. Imagine a drug prescribed for a cancer patient that doctors are certain will aggressively treat that patient’s cancer because they have a full understanding of the disease signatures of that patient’s particular form of cancer. These are the kind of things being talked about for the future.

In addition to be a part of the original research team that developed the prototype scanner, I am proud to now be a part of the new company, Omynx, leading the R&D division. For more information about this new venture, here is a link to the press release.

 StreetLab Mobile^TM has been launched by GE Homeland Protection!  I must disclose that I’ve only been a spectator in the development of StreetLab Mobile and it is the significant efforts of many talented engineers, product managers, marketing and sales personnel who deserve the credit.  They have asked what was needed and delivered a solution.  There is a whole list of features that StreetLab Mobile has to enhance this unit’s usefulness and usability for the customers.  I won’t spell those out here but rather use a “proof is in the pudding” approach. 

I have had the opportunity to use the unit itself, and more importantly, interact with some HAZMAT personnel who have also run some initial trials with the product.  It’s the attention to details that makes it usable.  For instance, StreetLab Mobile conforms to the type of field procedure that the individual customers have for chemical identification.  You can place a sample into a vial which fits into the integrated vial holder…or you can, with one hand (and this from a scrawny guy), hold the unit next to the sample…or you can use its designed leading edges where you can lay it on the ground with the lens in the sample, start it up and walk away.  Moreover, as time is of the essence during a scene assessment, the individual in the “hot zone” can just place the unit, and then have it be wirelessly controlled by somebody back at the rig.  Flexibility…to the situation, to the environment, and to the user…all to get the job done right. 

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned yet the real differentiator, the ability to use this unit not only to do your chemical identification, but to also read-out the results of a biological assay.  This creates the opportunity to not need a dedicated biological detection unit, which really translates to: less stuff in the rig, less maintenance, less equipment training.  The biological detection feature for StreetLab Mobile will be released in the near future… stay tuned for that.   

Hi Friends,  I am Suchismita, here to tell you about our interesting probes at the atomic scale, that gives us so much insight on how and why materials behave the way they do & how can we manipulate their behavior to get the best out of them!

I work with Schrodinger’s equation, to extract very useful numbers that tell me whether my dream of cooking (a reaction, of course!), is going to take place or not; or, in other words, is the reaction thermodynamically feasible? This becomes extremely useful while synthesizing new compounds say, for example, hydrogen storage, or look at new reaction pathways to create new phosphor materials.

Not only bulk properties, these “atomistic calculations” also teach us a lot about interface properties, such as grain boundaries, which are an integral part of poly-crystalline materials. More often than not, these grain boundaries control the strength of metals & alloys more than anything else! To add to the puzzle, many elements, when present in the bulk alloy, actually segregate to grain boundaries, to affect & alter overall bulk properties. So, wouldn’t it be fun if we could find out which elements have a deleterious effect on the grain boundary, say, by weakening them, & which other elements have the potential of strengthening the grain boundaries? That’s exactly what I am currently doing, as a part of the NanoMetals program!

Here we have taken a Pure Nickel grain boundary, as a starting point, as Ni forms the most common base metal for the high temperature superalloys used in jet engines. Of course it has a whole lot of other additions to it, but, one step at a time …..

We have added lot of elements (as dopants) to the grain boundary to inspect their effects on the “Cleavage Energy,” which is the energy to pull two grains apart, along the grain boundary. In presence of the dopant, if we need to put in more energy than in the pure case to cleave the grains, the grain boundary is stronger, and vice versa!

Our calculations show that by putting Sulfur, the cleavage energy of Ni-S goes down compared to pure Ni case. The physical implication is then that S weakens Ni grain boundaries. How about Boron? Boron is experimentally known to be a grain boundary strengthener, and voila! What do our calculations teach us? That Boron addition to grain boundary actually raises the cleavage energy values than the pure Ni grain boundary, hence strengthening it! Well, isn’t it fun, to see our calculations validating long-known experimental facts? We are now exploring role of newer dopants, and I will share those stories soon!

But why this differential behavior? This also can be explained with the help of these calculations! Charge density distribution maps show that the elements that promote charge localization along grain boundaries weaken them, as seen in case of Sulfur. On the other hand, the ones that promote bond sharing, viz. Cr, Hf, B, actually strengthens the grain boundary! Now this can be used as a simple design rule to predict which elements are going to give strong grain boundaries and which are not!

There are also other very interesting insights that these calculations are giving us with respect to functionalizing coatings, say, for superhydrophobic applications. I will be back to share those stories with you some time later! Till then, keep tracking those atoms around you!

Hi everyone. For those of you who have been following GE’s research efforts in hybrid systems and battery research, we just issued a press release this morning that provides a good summary of our “mega-hybrid” technologies. Pictured is our freshly painted Zero Emissions Hybrid Fuel Cell transit bus that we are working on with the FTA and the lithium-ion battery manufacturer A123Systems. The goal of that project is to design, build and demonstrate a commercially viable bus design for transit applications. With gas prices exceeding $4.00 per gallon and diesel fuel prices approaching $5.00, the momentum and efforts behind hybrid technology development is really picking up.

GE’s Marine and Stationary power business in Erie, PA today announced a cooperative effort with the C-MAR Group, a global provider of marine, manpower and engineering, to demonstrate the feasibility of a new hybrid tugboat technology. By water, rail, city streets and highways, we’ve got just about every mode of ground transportation covered. And if you saw my recent entry about our off-highway vehicle demonstration with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), they all seem to have a common theme. They are mega-hybrid applications.

The really exciting thing is that GE’s technology developments potentially could be scaled down to accelerate advancements in the passenger car market. We already have a projects with the DOE related to hybrid electric motors and high temperature capacitors that are aimed at supporting advancements in this space.