GE's Water Tech Research in China

At GE's Technology Research Center in China Researchers, Su Lv and Sijing Wang, Focus on Water Purification" Share Only the Water Portion Starting with Two Other Researchers

While we did get to experience a bit of the city of Shanghai and some of its food and attractions, the focus of our trip to China was GE's China Technology Center. We got to visit some of the labs and talk to several of the people who run research programs there. Our interviews spent a lot of time working out technical details of the research, but they also provided a broad overview of the research and some idea of how GE Shanghai operates. So we wanted to share some of that with you.

The people we talked to include Pengju Kang, a technology leader within GE Global Research whoseLinkedIn pagelists a total of five degrees obtained on three different continents. As he oversees several research groups, Kang spoke about everything from electrical transmission and battery technology to building physics-based computer models of the hardware that GE produces.

That later challenge was elaborated by Xu Fu, who got his PhD by developing an autopilot system for a small drone aircraft. (He still has the drone in his office and took off part of it to show off the additional hardware he added to provide the processor that executed his autopilot software.) Fu now works on developing computer models of the things GE builds—from factories and electrical grids to jet engines and wind turbines—to accurately reproduce the physics that govern these systems. The ultimate goal of this work is to get these models to help control the systems while in use—a challenge you'll be able to read a lot more about tomorrow.

Two other researchers, Su Lv and Sijing Wang, focused on a major challenge in China: water purification. A lot of the industry of China is situated where water resources are scarce, and it ends up competing with the population for this limited resource. Lv works on the ultimate technology behind purification: membranes with pores so small that they only allow water molecules to pass through while excluding salts and larger molecules. While this sounds delicate, each of these membranes is strong enough to support a bowling ball and withstand high pressures.

Sijing Wang works on ways of ensuring that the membranes have to do less. He builds integrated membrane bioreactors, where bacteria break down many of the chemicals before the water is passed on to membrane systems for final purification. His job, in some ways, is to create a home for bacteria that can use the toxic chemicals found in different types of waste as food; in fact, his lab had large containers of waste from different sources, such as mine sites and paper processing plants.

What's different about commercial research?

One of the answers I came up with is "not much." The labs looked like any academic lab I've been in, and watching Su Lv go over some results with his fellow researchers was a scene that could have come out of a lab anywhere. The challenges the researchers work on, while directed toward commercial applications, are just as interesting and technical as any that keep academic researchers engaged.

But there were differences. One is scale. Sijing Wang, who works on membrane bioreactors, actually has a facility on site that's got the footprint of a small building. It includes outdoor tanks that froth with bacteria, underground ones that grow bacteria that don't tolerate oxygen, and a set of membranes to clean up anything that gets past the bacteria. To more accurately model the behavior of the electric grid, Xu Fu is able to turn on a diesel generator up on the roof of the building. In the academic world, those sorts of things are rare outside the big national and international labs.

Source: ARS Technica

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• Purification
• Technology
• Research