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If you've got a GE appliance, chances are it came from here, GE's massive 750 acre Research and Development That facility in [UNKNOWN] Kentucky.
We have over 50 evaluation labs, and they do all manner of testing.
Today, we're getting a rare look inside.
We open and close the doors hundreds of thousand cycles.
To see, just what goes into building one of these.
Straight from the mines that create that we have good Clarence here first on the docket is cheap new virtual reality but what we're really trying to accomplish is to create a virtual environment that allows.
Both our designers and our engineers to work together collaboratively.
A traditional process would have involved our idea designers coming up with an idea, creating a rendering.
And then we would have created something like a prototype.
Now that the team can make adjustments and And VR, without having to build a physical model, development happens a lot quicker.
The handle's going edge to edge, and I'm wondering why we can't do that on the fridge as well?
Cutting weeks, sometimes even months out of the manufacturing process.
Many ideas remain ideas, and never turn into products.
But that's sort of the beauty of the system, is.
That's a very inexpensive way for us to go and test some of these more frontier of boundary ideas, without incurring the cost.
And it really makes failure to be a little more fun.
Getting a design to work in a virtual world, is just part of the challenge, before it can go ou to consumers.
It's got to go through here.
Right now we're in the mechanical life lab.
AKA the door slam.
I remember actually when I first started here and I came in this lab.
It was one of the most interesting places that I would come.
Engineers load the refridgerators with weights that simulate loads like milk, salad dressings and soda
How well the door seals, any gaps in the doors, if they drop, and those kind of things are very important to consumers.
Make sure their designs are ready for the real world, Jeff and his team test for worst case scenarios.
Well really stress the products to the point of Really learning how they perform after many, many, many years on the field.
That also means testing appliances for things like wireless interference.
So right now we're loading one of our newest cafe appliances into the anecote chamber.
We're warned to blast it with a bunch of different RF waves, electromagnetic energy to make sure that the applicance stays robust.
Radiation absorbent material inside sucks up the radio frequency signals in the air.
From out here, the team can fire up this giant antenna to generate all kinds of radio frequency signals, like the ones from your cell phone or your microwave and get an accurate reading of how they affect the other.
As our appliances have gotten smarter we have to consider all types of new parameters that we didn't have to consider in a more traditional appliance space.
Now we're concerned about radio waves and interference, you have to make sure that they're connecting every time, and that that information is flowing appropriately Connectivity is also at the center of what Sabrina Hannah is doing in her lab.
This is our consumer information testing lab and it's the lab where we do all of our cooking performance evaluation.
Her team determines what your oven does when you press buttons like these ones.
Behind the scenes when you press those buttons is we are choosing which elements to turn on And how to control the fan, we are looking at the temperatures within the food, temperatures within the oven cavity, we are taking samples at different time periods to look at moisture lost, browning on the exterior and really achieve the right heating rate, is that the interior and the exterior are right where we want them to be.
Today, she's working on adding more food items and modes to GE's latest lineup of connected ovens.
One of the things that we're working out right now is an airplane mode.
And what we're able to do with this is leverage the [UNKNOWN] system we have in this product.
And so with this [UNKNOWN] system, we can direct air from the top or from the back.
And so it's really gives us a unique ability To tailor a mode for a specific food.
And because theses are connected appliances we have the ability to add modes as we develop and get those out to users to improve their products.
Customer demands are not becoming any less strenuous.
They really are elevating every year.
So we wanna make sure that we exceed and that we meet all of those elements and bring the products forward.
Allow us to excel in the market place.
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