The GE Brief: March 23, 2021
MAKING WATER FROM AIR
Scientists at GE Research and their partners at U.S. universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are building a refrigerator-size device that they believe will one day be able to produce hundreds of liters of drinking water per day from air. The four-year AIR2WATER project is part of DARPA's Atmospheric Water Extraction (AWE) program, and its main goal is to reduce the risks involved in transporting potable water to troops in the field. But in the long run, similar technology could address water scarcity around the world. It’s also the perfect news to celebrate World Water Day, which took place Monday.
Safely quenching: AIR2WATER — or Additively Manufactured, Integrated Reservoir to Extract Water Using Adsorbents and Thermally-Enhanced Recovery — combines the latest advances in materials science, 3D printing and other advanced technologies. David Moore, principal investigator and technology manager for material physics and chemistry at GE Research, says by the end of the four-year project they hope to have the device producing up to 500 liters of water per day, which means it could churn out around a liter of water every three minutes.
To learn more about GE Research’s work on the AIR2WATER project, click here.
FIGHT AND FLIGHT
World War II was raging when a group of GE engineers gathered just outside of Boston to unwrap a secret package from England in 1941. The contents? Parts for the first jet engine successfully built and flown by the Allies. The engineers’ job? The U.S. War Department and the Army Air Corps had commissioned GE to rebuild and commercialize the engine, designed by Royal Air Force officer Frank Whittle. They had to quickly learn inside and out how the engine worked, create a plan to bring it to mass production — and help England win the war.
The highest heights: The work remained top secret. When the likely last living member of the GE team, Joseph Sorota, spoke to GE Reports in 2016 — 10 months before his death at the age of 96 — he recalled being warned by the FBI “that if I gave away any secrets, the penalty was death.” In the summer of 1942, Sorota and his colleagues loaded the first pair of working jet engines onto a railcar and shipped them to an Army field in the Mojave Desert. They installed them inside America’s first jet plane, the XP-59, and watched it climb to a height of 6,000 feet. It was a job well done that launched the United States into the jet age. GE, too: Now the company makes engines 100 times more powerful than the one that started it all. “It never dawned on me it was going to turn over the entire aircraft industry like it did,” Sorota said.
Click here for the awesome story of Joseph Sorota, the Hush-Hush Boys and a run of technological innovation that changed flight forever.
GE Aviation still tests jet engines in the Mojave Desert. You can read about it here.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Spiking The Spike
Engineers at MIT showed how ultrasound waves could damage the distinctive spike proteins of the virus that causes COVID-19.
2. Cry On Command
Researchers in the Netherlands have grown miniature models of human tear glands in the lab — and then made them cry.
3. Plant Talk
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have created a device that sends messages to plants through a tiny electrode.
Learn more here about this week’s Coolest Things On Earth.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“It never dawned on me it was going to turn over the entire aircraft industry like it did.”
— Joseph Sorota, employee No. 5 on the secret project to build the first jet engine in America during World War II
Quote: GE Reports. Images: University of California, Berkeley; GE Reports.