#237 from R&D Innovator Volume 5, Number 9          September 1996

Pushing the Boundary
by Walter L. Robb, Ph.D.

Dr. Robb is principal of Vantage Management, Inc., Schenectady, New York (phone 518-782-0050) helping companies use technology for competitive advantage.  Previously, he was director of General Electric’s R&D Center.

It’s not easy pushing the boundaries of technology—when the majority of your associates are saying that something won’t work.  But my experience is that this is exactly what is important for innovation to develop.

For almost fifty years, I’ve been involved with high-technology development.  That includes ten years at the bench, forty years in General Electric’s (GE) research and business management, and heading the R&D Center, which employed about 450 Ph.D.’s.  This was a tremendous opportunity for me, being associated with bright people who generated a hundred to three-hundred patents each year.  I like to think that my curiosity, questioning, stimulation, encouragement, and challenge helped these knowledgeable people stretch their minds, think big, and come up with breakthroughs.

Improved CT Scanning

One example in 1974 had to do with the company, EMI, challenging the existing x-ray companies with Godfrey Hounsfield’s breakthrough in computer-tomographic scanning (CT), which was the most significant advancement in diagnostic imaging since Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays.  Every x-ray company in the world responded by making incremental improvements on the EMI scanner, i.e., more detectors, bigger computers, etc.  That would have been the normal thing for GE’s Medical Systems to do as well.  However, I challenged our corporate laboratory to consider what the next breakthrough ought to be.  They responded with the fan-beam scanner, a much faster system than the translate/rotate system pioneered by Hounsfield and then copies by all the other x-ray companies.

EMI’s Hounsfield calculated that GE’s fan-beam, rotate-only approach wouldn’t be practical.  That further challenged our group, making the race even more exciting.  But as a result of achieving this breakthrough, and of going from concept to manufacturing in record time, GE shortly became the leader in CT manufacturing.  The GE fan-beam concept is now used by almost all CT manufacturers.

Improved Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Seven years later, we were presented a similar challenge.  How could we make a major breakthrough in the field of magnetic resonance imaging?  Conventional thinking was to use a magnetic field strength between 0.1 and 0.5 Tesla.  Our researchers felt that a better signal could be achieved at 1.5 Tesla; i.e., the higher the field, the stronger the signal. 

As with the CT example, other groups calculated that there would be some difficult challenges with body penetration of the required radio frequency input signal.  While the GE team’s calculations also showed this to be a problem, it also showed that it was possible to overcome the difficulty.  

Again, this excited the scientists and got them focused on overcoming problems that others had considered insurmountable.  And once again, those who pushed the boundaries won over those making incremental improvements.  GE captured the number one position in the magnetic resonance imaging race.

Separating Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide

In my own research, I was asked to develop a membrane to use in removal of CO2 from the O2-CO2 gas mixture inside a manned space capsule.  Most polymeric membranes had a permeability for CO2 that was between four- and eight-times the permeability of O2; but what we really wanted was a factor of 100. 

The conventional research tried various ways to modify the best polymeric membranes, but methods that reduced the separation factor by even a little, reduced the permeability rate, making the membrane impractical.

I decided to experiment with liquid layers, initially not worrying about how I would make them into a membrane.  I simply felt that experiments with different fluids and organic monomers might lead me to a breakthrough that could then be incorporated into a solid membrane.

Imagine my delight when pure water gave me a separation factor of ten!  When I put some sodium or potassium hydroxide in the water, separation factors went as high as 100.  After learning that cesium hydroxide is more soluble than the other two hydroxides, I tried it and was amazed that the separation factor was now 1,000!

This, of course, also excited my associates who developed the concept into what are now known as immobilized liquid membranes.  This early effort to break away from the limitations of polymeric membranes led to a class of much more efficient gas-separating devices.

My message is that while we focus on continuous improvement of our products and processes, don’t let that focus deter us from making the occasional breakthrough discovery.  I’ll bet that the leaders, a decade from now, will be the ones accomplishing these types of breakthroughs.