In late May, Ars continued its global tour of GE research centers. This destination? The John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, India. We spent three days talking to researchers but barely touched on all the work that goes on there. Sadly, a number of interesting looking labs weren't on our agenda (we merely saw partly disassembled hardware here and there).
However, we did talk to a number of interesting people. Two of them came from GE's Power and Water research team, which has over 100 engineers in India. Anil Rajanna and Kannan Tinnium (who got his PhD from Tulane and worked in the US for over a decade) described how research in Bangalore tackled everything from the materials used to build the wind turbines to the software that manages entire wind farms.
Rajanna showed off the materials testing lab, where they push components past the breaking point—literally. The lab was filled with shattered fiberglass and snapped steel bolts. They've also got the full suite of electronics that runs a wind turbine, handling everything from voltage conversions to the pitch and yaw of the turbine blades. The team is set up to test behavior under a variety of conditions, including the use of batteries to help bridge periods where wind slacks off. Elsewhere on campus, there's more battery research and work on grid basics like transformers.
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