TCS Has Developed a Solution to Connect Intelligent LEDs to GE's Predix Operating System for Gas Turbine Manufacturing

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, announced that it has developed an innovative digital solution to connect Intelligent LEDs to GE's Predix operating system for the Industrial Internet through Intel Atom-based gateways, providing critical analytics to save significant time and costs in the manufacturing process.

The digital solution will analyze temperature at various points on the metal turbine parts as they are assembled and cooled, allowing operators to know when the next operation can be performed, reducing wait time between operations and improving quality monitoring. The pilot application was built and deployed for GE Power's gas turbine manufacturing plant in Greenville, South Carolina.

During the turbine manufacturing process, rotor stacking is a key process and needs extremely high levels of precision. If the rotor wheels are stacked incorrectly due to differences in the surface temperature, it will require reassembly, incurring heavy additional costs and two to three weeks of shipment delays.

TCS' new digital solution provides automatic data collection of ambient room and rotor surface temperatures, measuring for unacceptable variations, notifying workers when the next operation may proceed, and alerting workers to any non-uniformity. This application is built on the intelligent LED platform by GE and Intel that can reduce costs and energy consumption and provide data collection and analytics capabilities. This platform is composed of smart LED fixtures from Current, powered by GE, integrated with sensors that monitor temperature, humidity and any physical object presence, transmitting the data to an Intel Atom-based gateway where the information is streamed to the Predix cloud.

As part of the GE Digital Alliance Program, TCS has made significant investments in scaling its Predix practice, having more than 550 of a planned 1,000 consultants already trained with hands-on execution experience across designing, architecting and conceptualizing solutions on the Predix platform. Predix helps industrial businesses with their digital transformation using software, apps and analytics that enable them to operate faster, smarter and more efficiently.

Keywords: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), GE, GE Predix, Intel Atom, ARC Advisory Group