Visiting the John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore was a rewarding experience in a lot of ways. Our hosts and the researchers we talked to were incredibly friendly and helpful. The local crew who helped us with the filming was superb. The labs and design studio were clearly places where interesting problems were being tackled. And perhaps most importantly, I finally got to set foot in an industrial lab where I could tell what the equipment was for just by looking at it.

Yes, GE has a life sciences lab in Bangalore. The life sciences became relevant here when GE purchased the Swedish lab equipment company Akta (a company that researchers of my vintage knew as Pharmacia). The original plan was to use researchers in Bangalore to develop low-cost equipment to sell into the biotechnology markets that are developing in India and China (we drove past an Astra-Zenica research facility on the way to the airport). But at least one piece of the hardware they developed—a device that automates protein purification—ended up so useful and affordable that it's being sold globally.

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The device was neat because it combines everything you need for protein separation—a UV absorption sensor, pumps, and so on—all in one bit of hardware. Each of the key parts other than the control system is also on the exterior, held in place by an allen bolt. So if something breaks, it's incredibly easy to replace. It was a product that was both familiar to me (I instantly knew what it did) but different enough that it was clearly better than anything people were using back when I was doing research.

In other words, it's exactly what you'd like to see coming out of a commercial R&D lab. The same goes for another piece of hardware that we could look at but were asked not to talk about (and didn't even try to take photographs of. Hopefully we'll hear more of it down the line.)

Something else I was familiar with (sadly through circumstances less happy than my research career) was the medical equipment. CAT and PET scanners were seemingly down every hallway in the Welch Technology Center, some of them partly disassembled. They're typically the sorts of hardware you'd associate with expensive medical tests, but the work here was focused on bringing down their price in order to make their use accessible to more of India's population.

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And that's not something GE felt it could achieve through the sorts of evolutionary changes driving the wind turbine business; instead, the researchers were looking to make fundamental changes to the hardware components.

But the design team at the E cube studio was also doing their best to ensure that the hardware was put to use once it went out into hospitals and clinics. While some of their work involved making sure there was a consistent design language to GE's medical products (lots of white hardware with rounded edges), the team also worked with the facilities where the machines would be installed, creating friendly, approachable environments for the hardware. They even consulted with hospitals to try to streamline patients' experiences, cutting down on the confusion and bureaucracy that often greet patients at medical facilities.

All three of our days in the research center involved some time in the renewable energy test areas—for GE, this means wind power. And for the research, that meant having the complete brains of the system, which normally lives inside the tower, controlling everything from the angle of the blades to how the power gets fed into the grid. The brains were a mass of Ethernet cables, custom connections, and more embedded processors than the researchers were willing to count.

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To test this hardware and the software it runs, GE had everything in place to simulate different strains on the turbine itself, batteries for storage, and the hardware that's normally used to mange connections with the grid. All of that could be used to make sure the hardware and software behaved itself under a variety of circumstances.

But the lab that looked the most fun was, in many ways, the most limited: it focused on breaking the materials that go into the wind turbine in the name of science (or at least engineering). The lab featured three hydraulic devices that, when powered up, could put metals and composites under excessive strain.

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Snapped steel and shattered fiberglass samples were everywhere (sadly, we were asked not to show the broken fiberglass), a testament to how far the researchers would go to understand the circumstances needed to get their hardware to fail. The team was even willing to snap a steel bolt for us, showing how strain on the metal changed the conduction of currents through it, allowing the process of failure to be tracked in real time.

It looked like a fun job.