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.

Meet the researchers at GE's Bangalore technology center.

Health and life science featured prominently in our visit as well. For health care, the researchers here are motivated by local issues: cancer and cardiac diseases are major killers in India, primarily because they get diagnosed very late in the diseases' progression. That in turn is because lots of the population doesn't have access to medical facilities with the latest diagnostic equipment. Engineers are trying to figure out how to get the cost down on equipment in order to make it more accessible. One example: they've designed a PET scanner (useful in cancer diagnosis) so that it starts with a single row of sensors. This makes for a slow scan to begin with, but if there's sufficient demand, additional rows can be bought and added separately.

We met with members of GE's Ecube design studio, including its head, Parag Trivedi. The team there does everything from ensuring that the hardware has a consistent design language to figuring out how to integrate it with improved hospital practices that make for better patient experiences. They've even got a model of a hospital floor so they can track a patient's experiences when they come in for a procedure.

Finally, we met with Veena Rao, who is an engineering manager in its life sciences group (and a fellow former biologist). Veena now designs hardware for other scientists to use, mostly for purifying and characterizing proteins. The results of her team's work get sent to Sweden, where a GE subsidiary makes the final hardware.

We had a great time talking with everyone there, and hopefully you'll enjoy some of the discussions throughout the week just as much.