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[[patent pending - a video podcast series from GE]]
[I work here at the GE Global Reasearch lab in the Energy Systems Laboratory.]
[This place is designed to take people's ideas,]
[let them grow and turn into big things.]
[So it's--you're opportunities are really what you make of them. ]
[You really couldn't find a better job.]
[The fact that I get paid to work in places like this is pretty awesome.]
[I'd like to thank you for coming along with me today.]
[I'm going to take you through my lab and show you a little bit.]
[I want to talk about energy specifically.]
[Energy and energy conversion fascinate me.]
[They've been part of my life every since I've been a little kid, going up through college.]
[The magnitude of the challenge, the opportunities out there,]
[the variety of feedstocks, regulations, environmental impact;]
[all those things make it a very challenging problem.]
[And, to me, that's interesting; the things I like to work on.]
[So if we take coal, for an example, coal is really just a big lump of carbon.]
[It's got some hydrogen in there, a few other elements.]
[It's the workhorse of what's used today to make electricity, ]
[both in the U. S. and throughout the world.]
["If it's out there and it's so popular why do we care?"]
[What our goal here is to try to make a more efficient and cleaner use ]
[to make the world a better place.]
[And that process we use is called gasification.]
[Simply stated, it's trying to take this big lump of carbon ]
[and turn it into a combustible gas that we can use to make power.]
[In reality it's a very complex system.]
[There's a lot of chemistry involved, heat transfer, thermodynamics, and a variety of things.]
[And that's kind of what we do in a lab like this today.]
[So we've got a variety of programs going on to look at how you pre-process the coal, ]
[dry it, move it around into a system.]
[We have a reactor, similar to this one, ]
[where we can bring in a variety of constituents of gas, ]
[we can look at the chemistry through the process, ]
[look at how temperature impacts it, ]
[look at the exhaust that comes out and what that constitutes.]
[We can then look at cleaning up this exhaust, ]
[removing things like carbon dioxide and other elements ]
[that we don't want to go into the atmosphere.]
[The challenge with that then is we--it's called a synthesis gas, ]
[and we need to convert that into power.]
[So we have a unique capability here where we can take]
[researchers from around the world and put them together to make very complex]
[pieces of hardware like this.]
[This is a nozzle that would go into a combustion system, ]
[and what it allows us to do is bring that fuel, or the syngas we just made, ]
[into a system, mix it with air, and fuel, and appropriate methods ]
[to make very clean energy, high energy stuff to go into a gas turbine ]
[and get some power out of it.]
[The ability to take this from the clean-sheet, through a PC design,]
[looking at all the analytics that go involved--]
[the basic physics, the heat transfer, the thermodynamics--]
[into a piece of hardware, into a large test cell facility we have out back and test it,]
[We get to validate the emissions predictions, the performance of it.]
[Then we can take this, work with our business and our ecomagination theme]
[and make products that actually go into the field.]
[And I've got to tell you, the feeling that you get when you walk out]
[and see something that you've worked on making power, ]
[making an impact in the world is huge.]
[You can't get that in a lot of places and at GE you can.]
[So let me leave you with this:]
[if you imagine a time when there's a process that takes a piece of coal like this]
[into a process, generates electricity, fuels, clean water and a variety of other streams, ]
[and puts out an exhaust gas that's as clean or cleaner ]
[than the air that it breathes is an amazing thing.]
[And it's our job at GE Global Research to make that happen. Imagine that!]
