Combustion scientist Herman Snyder, who relocated from Wisconsin, had worked at a Caterpillar subsidiary designing gas turbine engines.
They'd lived through more than one "revolutionary" power train--Wankel engines, gas-turbine engines, batteries.
And it shows with the company's Ecomagination line of green and energy-efficient products, which include windmills and fuel-efficient turbine engines.
It's also where you'll find an intriguing startup, Innodyn, that is attempting to shrink the size of gas turbine engines.
Used in jet turbine engines and automotive rechargeable batteries.
Combustion scientist Herman Snyder, who relocated from Wisconsin, had worked at a Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) subsidiary designing gas turbine engines.
Snyder, who spent four years on turbine engines at a Cat subsidiary, ran dozens of two- and three-week-long simulations on a minisupercomputer, crunching 10 million equations each time, to design a new nozzle that would turn insulin into the right-size droplets.
In addition, thousands of firms and entrepreneurs own single- and multi-engine aircraft powered by Intermittent Combustion (non-turbine) engines.
Salesforce is enabling that interface so that humans and turbine or jet engines could collaborate through a social network.
The other will produce thousands of hi-tech turbine blades for jet aircraft engines around the world.
Meanwhile Rolls-Royce has sought to insulate itself from the quirks of procurement by applying its design to other industries: 80% of the gas-turbine technology used in its best-selling jet engines is the same for the energy and marine sectors.
Don Enns, a regional manager at the independent Transportation Safety Board of Canada, told CTV and CP24 on Tuesday that "some sort of failure" inside one of the plane's two engines disrupted the airflow, causing part of the turbine section to fly out the back.
CNN: Engine malfunction caused plane debris to fall in Canada
As with many other products--including tungsten-filament lightbulbs, X-ray machines and jet engines--GE bought patents from an inventor to get into the turbine business, then refined the design and manufacturing techniques ( see time line).
But engines are already operating at levels above 2, 500 degrees Fahrenheit, the melting point of the turbine blades that propel the plane, forcing engineers to dream up exotic cooling systems and turn to special coatings and unwieldy materials like ceramics.
FORBES: The Billion-Dollar Bet On Jet Tech That's Making Flying More Efficient
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