GE Says It's Leveraging Artificial Intelligence To Cut Product Design Times In Half

Bassam Mohammed Abdelnabi adjusts a combustion test rig in a GE lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., on which researchers have run tests to validate simulations used to develop an AI model that they say will radically cut the time it takes to design products.Courtesy of General Electric Artificial intelligence is helping computers drive cars, recognize faces in a crowd and hold lifelike conversations. General Electric engineers now say they've used the data-intensive technology to develop tools that could cut the industrial giant's design process for jet engines and power turbines in at least half, speeding up its next generation of products. Today, it might take two days for engineers to run a computational analysis of the fluid dynamics of a single design for a turbine blade or an engine component. Scientists at General Electric's research center in Niskayuna, New York, say they've leveraged machine learning to train a surrogate model so that it can evaluate a million variations of a design in just 15 minutes. "This is, we think, a huge breakthrough," Robert Zacharias, technology director of thermosciences at GE Research, tells Forbes.