In late 1959, the J79 engine was configured with a drive and shaft and GE Aviation began working with Grumman Aircraft on a new, large experimental hydrofoil boat, the Denison, for the U.S. Navy. In its marine configuration, the J79 was designated the LM1500. Learn more about GE Marine: https://lnkd.in/e_6Zj2U
The U.S Federal Aviation Administration granted certification of the T25 engine sensor for the GE90-94B engine in February. The upgraded T25 sensor, located in the inlet to the high pressure compressor, is being retrofitted into more than 400 GE90-94B engines in service. The T25 sensor provides pressure and temperature measurements for the engine’s control system.
“Additive manufacturing has allowed GE engineers to quickly change the geometry through rapid prototyping and producing production parts, saving months of traditional cycle time for the T25 sensor housing without impacting the sensor’s capabilities,” said Bill Millhaem, general manager of the GE90/GE9X engine program at GE Aviation.
The T25 sensor housing is just the start of additive manufacturing at GE Aviation. Several next-generation engines currently in development will incorporate the advance manufacturing technique. On the LEAP* engine for narrowbody aircraft and the GE9X for the Boeing 777X aircraft, GE Aviation will produce part of the fuel nozzles with additive manufacturing.
Additive manufacturing represents a significant technology breakthrough for GE and the aviation industry. Unlike traditional manufacturing methods that mill or cut away from a metal slab to produce a part, additive manufacturing (also called 3D printing) "grows" parts directly from a CAD file using layers of fine metal powder and an electron beam or laser. The result is complex, dense parts without the waste, manufactured in a fraction of the time it would take using other methods.
Additive manufacturing has many advantages. It allows GE to design parts with unique geometries that were impossible to create using traditional machining methods. These additive manufactured components can reduce part count by replacing assemblies with single parts and can be lighter than previous designs, saving weight and increasing an engine’s fuel efficiency.
Click here to learn more about additive manufacturing at GE Aviation.
GE Aviation, an operating unit of GE (NYSE: GE), is a world-leading provider of jet, turboprop and turboshaft engines, components and integrated systems for commercial, military, business and general aviation aircraft. GE Aviation has a global service network to support these offerings.
(Bloomberg) -- About 15 years after General Electric Co. held a high-profile bake-off to determine the successor to then-Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch, speculation has begun over who could be next in line for the top post.
Possible candidates to succeed CEO Jeffrey Immelt come from across GE and include Steve Bolze, head of the power and water unit; Lorenzo Simonelli, the oil and gas CEO; and Vice Chairman John Rice, analysts said in interviews. Shannon O'Callaghan of UBS AG and William Blair & Co.'s Nicholas Heymann were among analysts who discussed potential successors.
A Barclays Plc note on Monday sparked the latest round of speculation and suggested Chief Financial Officer Jeff Bornstein was a front-runner. How GE proceeds depends largely on when the 59-year-old Immelt opts to exit, especially if the next CEO intends to match Welch's two-decade tenure. A sudden vacancy now may favor a seasoned executive such as Rice, 58, while Simonelli, 41, may be better situated if Immelt departs in a few years.
"They clearly have deep bench strength, much deeper than most corporations," said Gail Meneley, a principal at Chicago-based consultant Shields Meneley Partners, whose clients include McDonald's Corp. and Johnson & Johnson. "They will of course place heavy weight on the opinion of the CEO who has been in the seat and knows what it takes."
Industrial Focus
Immelt, CEO and chairman of the 305,000-employee industrial giant since 2001, is reshaping GE around its industrial divisions as he looks to boost margins and energize a languishing stock. Since he took over for Welch four days before the 9/11 terror attacks, the shares have fallen 35 percent while the Standard & Poor's 500 Industrials index has almost doubled. The 2008-09 financial crisis slammed the GE Capital unit, imperiling the Fairfield, Connecticut-based parent company.
Welch started formal succession-planning discussions more than seven years before he stepped down, according to a 2001 Fortune article. In a June 1994 board meeting, Welch brought a handwritten list of 24 candidates separated into three categories: "obvious field," "contenders" and "broader consensus field." The three executives who made it to the final round -- Immelt, Robert Nardelli and James McNerney -- all started in the third category.
In subsequent years, Welch arranged social events for directors to get to know the executives, while not publicly revealing the challengers until after the selection was made. Promotion decisions were made to give the leading candidates broader experience. Immelt was rumored to be a favorite a year before he was announced as the winner.
Retirement Plans?
After more than a decade as CEO, Immelt could step down in the next year, Barclays's Scott Davis said Monday in a note. "Most investors are ready for a change at the top now," Davis said.
Seth Martin, a GE spokesman, declined to comment about the Barclays report, and Immelt hasn't said when he plans to retire. In an October interview, he said, "There will be a natural time to think about a transition, but for right now you're stuck with me."
The timing and field of potential successors could be dictated in part by whether Immelt is successful in his effort to focus GE around high-margin industrial units.
"It very much depends on the success of the current plan," said UBS's O'Callaghan. "If it fails, who knows what's going to happen?"
While GE has a history of grooming candidates internally, a sharp slump in the business could force it to look outside, said Peter Sorrentino, a portfolio manager for Cincinnati-based Huntington Asset Advisors Inc., which owns GE shares.
'Same Kool-Aid'
"I don't know that it's a GE insider because this team has been together long enough and are sort of drinking the same Kool-Aid," Sorrentino said. "If you don't change the scenery you're going to get the same thing."
Immelt had some early missteps, including overpaying for U.K.-based biotechnology company Amersham Plc in a $10.3 billion deal in 2004, said Jack De Gan, chief investment officer of Harbor Advisory Corp. The CEO has earned back some investor goodwill with more recent moves, including the effort to shrink the volatile finance arm, said De Gan, whose Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based firm owns about 100,000 GE shares among its $130 million in assets.
"The market over the last year or so is starting to come to believe that the transformation of GE's portfolio and the rapid decline in the financial business is going to do the trick," De Gan said. "Late '16, early '17 is a time when the market should really be appreciating the work he's done."
To contact the reporters on this story: Richard Clough in New York at rclough9@bloomberg.net; Thomas Black in Dallas at tblack@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Edward Dufner at edufner@bloomberg.net Larry Reibstein
Engineers at jet engine proving grounds in Ohio are using a jet engine GE developed for Boeing’s Dreamliner to test engine parts made from a new ceramic super-material. The material could help pave the way to more fuel efficient planes.
The temperatures inside jet engines are so extreme that even parts from high-end titanium alloys require an intricate cooling system to work well. But the new material, called ceramic matrix composite, needs 20 percent less cooling air, which allows engineers to extract more power from the extra heat. “When you drop the need for cooling components, your engine will become aerodynamically more efficient and also more fuel efficient,” Jonathan Blank, who leads CMC and advanced polymer matrix composite research at GE Aviation, told GE Reports.
Top: The GEnx engine with ceramic parts during testing at Peebles in February. The grey orb at the front of engine is the “turbulence control structure.” (Read more here.) Above: A GEnx-1B engine suspended from a Dreamliner jet. A version of this engine will also power the next Air Force One. Image credits: GE Aviation
GE Aviation is testing the GEnx jet engine with the ceramic parts at its hard-core testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. The parts include inner and outer combustor liners, high-pressure turbine stage one shrouds, and stage two nozzles. CMC stage one nozzles for the high-pressure turbine will be tested on the second build of this demo engine.
GE has spent the last two decades and over $1 billion developing CMCs. The light material, which has one-third the weight of metal, is made from a combination of silicon carbide ceramic fibers and ceramic resin sealed together during a highly sophisticated process, and further enhanced with proprietary coatings. GE recently opened the first CMC factory in Asheville, N.C.
Boeing’s 777X jet will use GE engines as well as avionics and power systems. Illustration credit: Boeing
GE is currently designing CMC parts for the next generation of jet engines like the LEAPand the GE9X. If fact, the GEnx in Peebles is a stand-in for the GE9X, which is still in development and will power Boeing’s new 777X wide-body passenger jet.
GE and its partners will spend more that $500 million on maturing CMC parts this year alone. “The GEnx engine testing campaign, which began in late January, will allow us to demonstrate the functionality and durability of the full suite of CMC hot section components, and help the team lock down the final design for the new GE9X engine by mid-2015,” said Bill Millhaem, general manager of GE’s GE90 and GE9X engine programs.
Although the GE9X isn’t scheduled to enter service until the end of the decade, GE has already received $20 billion (list price) in orders and commitments from airlines like Emirates, Lufthansa, Etihad and others.
But GE isn’t done. All of the CMC components inside the GEnx engine are static, they don’t move. In February, engineers scored animportant breakthrough when they for the first time successfully tested rotating parts made from CMCs inside a jet engine turbine. “Going from nickel alloys to rotating ceramics inside the engine is the really big jump,” Blank told GE Reports. “CMCs allow for a revolutionary change in jet engine design.”
A turbine rotor with blades made from CMCs after a test. The yellow blades are covered with an environmental barrier for experimental purposes. Image credit: GE Aviation.
Desk Work vs.Test Work - How does your work perform? #EngineersWeek #eweek15 #avgeek http://t.co/DSSvWY99l2
Third quarter earnings results for GE were fueled by strong orders growth, a few of which include the new GE9X engine. Set to enter service in 2020, the GE9X received its first orders valued at $3.8 billion. Like the LEAP, it will have advanced composites and 3D-printed parts. Read more about what's coming up next: http://invent.ge/1DiiuhR
I’d like to die on Mars
By GE Look aheadPosted May 18, 2014
A year ago, one of Silicon Valley’s most noted executives, Elon Musk, made headlines with a simple proclamation: “I’d like to die on Mars.” The billionaire founder and CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors isn’t the only one looking at the red planet as a future destination for human civilisation. In 2012, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the 100 Year Starship, a joint initiative with NASA, tasked with achieving interstellar travel within 100 years, with the hope of getting humans to Mars by 2030. Earlier this year, President Obama extended funding for the International Space Station (ISS) for at least another decade, and space agencies from countries including the US, India, China, Russia and Japan committed to collaborating on space exploration. The enthusiasm for Mars is not limited to billionaire entrepreneurs and governments. In 2013, Mars One, a private space organisation in the Netherlands, received more than 200,000 applications to be part of a four-person team to go on a one-way mission to colonise Mars in 2024.
Currently, manned flight within our solar system does not fully leverage the advances in rocket propulsion and gyroscopic capabilities that have made unmanned voyages into deep space possible. Former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz plans to change that with the ambitious goal of bringing astronauts to Mars in as little as 39 days. Diaz’s Houston-based company, Ad Astra, is working with NASA to build the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR VX200), which employs electromagnetism to accelerate and fine-tune spacecraft propulsion outside of orbit. The first rocket test launch is scheduled for 2015 and aims to make a marked improvement on the nearly nine-month journey currently projected by NASA.
Colonisation, however, presents a host of challenges beyond landing on the surface of Mars. We first need better understanding of the elements that support synthesis and sustenance of life in environments both unfamiliar and inhospitable to humans. In preparation for survival outside our planet, NASA exobiologists are already examining the chemical composition of Martian terrain and incorporating their analysis into the agency’s future mission to Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon. American biologist Craig Venter, famed for his early sequencing of the human genome, has proposed equipping future unmanned rover missions with next-generation DNA sequencers to scan and analyse the genetic sequence of extraterrestrial compounds and then radio the sequence to Earth for synthesis and further testing. In 2016, the German Aerospace Center will send a satellite mission into low-Earth orbit to study regenerative food production, making it the first synthetic biology experiment to occur outside of Earth’s atmosphere.
To pay for these efforts, space agencies around the world are turning to both governments and private funders. SpaceX, for example, has received more than $240m in capital financing and multi-billion-dollar contracts from an international consortium of public organisations to bring supplies to the ISS. However, decreased political will and dwindling public budgets are creating funding uncertainty for such projects. But scientific investments, similar to those in GPS and MRI scanners, can bring widespread benefits that extend beyond their initial research objectives. Despite the inevitable challenges ahead, humanity’s Promethean reach for the stars can yet again bring fire to the Earth below.
Innovative materials, like ceramic matrix composites, are making our jet engines lighter and more efficient.
Among the panelists present, Aarif Aziz, HR, Head, GE John F Welch Technology Center shared the GE case on how learning function can bring more value to business. Read on.
http://bit.ly/GEJWAzim
A gas turbine service manual can sometimes be over 1,000 pages long. Thanks to the Industrial Internet, the reading just got a whole lot lighter.
CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aviation and the French engine manufacturer Snecma, added a multi-billion dollar order, bringing the total to $47.5 billion in 2011 (U.S. list price).
The company announced this morning that the low fare carrier Southwest Airlines would purchase a total of 416 engines valued at $4.7 billion. The order includes 300 innovative LEAP engines to power the airline’s 150 new Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, and 116 CFM56 engines for 58 planes of the existing 737 model.
To explore how the innovative tech of the LEAP engine reduces costs and emissions, check out the infographic.
GE and Snecma, a member of the Safran Group, each hold a 50 percent stake in CFM. The new airplanes will begin delivery in 2017.
CFM started working on the LEAP engine, short for Leading Edge Aviation Propulsion, in 2005. The goal was to develop a high-bypass turbofan engine that radically increases the fuel efficiency of narrow-body aircraft that carry between 100 and 250 passengers and fly within a 4,000-mile range.
