Yesterday, one of those big toy haulers like the NASCAR teams use showed up in our parking lot. It had "2012 An Electric Odyssey" painted on it, and it was from GE. Part of GE anyway. GE Energy Management was the group running the tour, and they are the part of GE that builds electrical distribution and controls, like circuit breakers, MCCs, switchgear, transformers, arc-flash mitigatin solutions; motors and generators, power electronics and the industrial services that go with all those products.
GE bus riders included Lisa Bagwell, global specification engineering manager for industrial solutions,Andrew Sohn, product line manager for the services business, Tim Ford, product manager,Marty Trivette, seniour product manager for switchgear and such, and Ashley Sauve-Kusowski (GE) and Gina DeRossi (MPR) along as marcom.
I told them that I was a low voltage DC guy, but that I'd had some experience with their stuff, and was there to learn something...which I proceeded to do.
Some of the highlights of the tour of the bus included Arc Flash mitigation. Arc Flash is something anybody who goes into plants needs to know about, be trained to avoid, and maintain that training. GE provides drive-specific arc flash reduction solutions, arc flash hazard analysis, electrical safety training and all that, but what really was the cool product was their Arc Vault solution. It is a safety containment to which an arc can be diverted in less than 10 mS, so that the flash occurs in the vault instead of in your face. Faces being very hard to replace, this is a Good Thing(tm).
GE's Entellisys low voltage switchgear is highly defended against arc flash conditions, and has remote HMI. These, the GE folks said, were ideal for critical power applications like hospitals and data centers.
Next they showed me a new switchboard product that has instantaneous zone selectivity interlocking, providing arc fault protectoin and instantaneous selectivity. RELT (reduced energy let through) instantaneous trip allows circuit breakers to be temporarily set to more sensitivity in the presence of deformed wave forms.
Andrew Sohn's services group has a novel robotic pipe inspection tool. If you can take a valve out of the line, he can run his robot down the line and give you a complete internal inspection. This is wonderful for oil and gas pipelines where corrosion is a significant problem.
Fascinating stuff, even for an old LVDC guy like me.
Thanks to GE for coming.
