Assignment No.

II

Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

Faculty of Engineering

EMM5702
ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY
AND PROCESS
Lecturer: Professor Dr. Shamsuddin B. Sulaiman

INDIVIDUAL
ASSIGNMENT
INDIVIDUAL
ASSIGNMENT

Name

Dickson Timinyo

Matrik No.

GS 38235

Updated 03 April 2014

REVIEW OF CURRENT TRENDS IN GENERAL ELECTRIC (GE) HOME

APPLIANCES MANUFACTURING PROCESSES & TECHNOLOGY

Dickson Timinyo (rhodatim@gmail.com)

Keywords: Trend, General Electric, GE, household, domestic, home Appliances,
Processes, Manufacturing, Technology

1.
ABSTRACT
In the past decade, particularly, the home appliance has gone through many changes. The
appliance industry has always been driven by trends in the consumer needs. Consumers
broadening knowledge of technology has changed their views of what they want in their
various living home. Consumer trends indicate a multiplicity of needs, segmentation and
individualizing of demand, greater emphasis on design, plurality of styles, greater
environmental/energy consciousness and increased orientation towards leisure activities.
For this reasons, the appliance industries is trapped by trends in manufacturing processes
and technology to provide satisfaction for the consumers. This technical paper presents
the most common trends in General Electric (GE) household appliances.
2.
INTRODUCTION
General Electric or GE is the largest industrial conglomerates headquarter located in
America, range of products, goods and services including home appliances, power
generators, jet engines, television broadcasting and medical equipment. These appliances
include refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, washing machine, electrical ranges, clothes
washers, electric clothes dryers, mobile phone and PC. Previous scholars focus on
household energy appliance consumption as well as cost effectiveness. This technical
paper focuses on the trends in General Electric home appliances with respect to the
advance technology and processes
2.1
Brief History
General Electric is a multinational conglomerate that manufactures large-scale industrial
products, produces consumer appliances, and provides financial services. GE's operations
now span the financial services, energy, industrial manufacturing and healthcare. In 2010,
GE was ranked the second-largest company in the world by Forbes based on a formula
that included sales, net income, assets, and market capitalization.
3.
THE CURRENT TRENDS
3.1
Trends in Electric Power
It is strongly believe that every home uses electrical power and below described the
current existing trends
Natural gas turbines are 25- 50% more efficient than coal based steam and
produce only 40% as much CO2 per unit of electricity
Concern over natural gas supply and prices
Over 90% of proposed new power plants in America are gas turbines

 No new large coal or nuclear plants have been built in past 20 years and oil is
being phased out as an electricity generating fuel.
Deregulation favors low cost power stations such as gas over nuclear power
3.2
Technological Change/Trends
Technological change reflects the ability to get more output with the same inputs. Overall
technological change refers to an equiproportionate lowering of costs across all factors of
production, such as labor, materials, capital and energy. It may result from improvements
in input quality or production processes (Denison, 1972; Griliches, 1986; Srivastava and
Heady, 1973). Overall technological change helps explain a trend of falling prices at a
time of rapidly increasing room air, central air and refrigerator appliance efficiency. In
contrast to overall technological change, efficiency-directed technological change
reduces the relative cost of the high efficiency appliances. In the context of energy
efficient appliances, Newell et al. (1999) developed a hedonic supply model and found
evidence of both overall technological change and efficiency- directed technological
change in household appliances. Greening et al. (1997) also use a hedonic framework to
estimate the price of appliances as a function of energy-efficiency levels. several possible
reasons for this trend, including overall technological change and technological change
directed at producing more efficient appliances for lower cost, and lower markups
charged to the customer. With technological improvements, productivity growth and
competitive pressures along the production and distribution chain are met
3.3 Trends in Home Washers
The trends in efficient household washers appliances are as followed
Most efficient clothes washer uses 70% less electricity than does least efficient
available.
Spins clothes drier, thereby reducing drier time and energy use
It uses 85% less water, saving 16,000 gallons per year
It gets clothes cleaner
It costs twice as much
3.4
Trends in Batteries
A confirmation of significant progresses in battery capacities (and a correlative decrease
in their cost) but also a growing interest for hybridization with super-capacitors to get
bacitors which is a combination of lithium-ion battery and a super-capacitor. Similarly,
propositions and business moves to decrease the cost of batteries: Second life market and
Large scale stationary electricity storage. However, Several scientific congresses have
concluded that specific policies should focus on this trend and encourage large scale
stationary storage to decrease (through economies of scale) the battery costs while
allowing a better management of renewable electricity sources. Furthermore, practical
progresses in battery recycling but a political question about the rent distribution between
the manufacturer, the consumer and the recycler. Therefore, research on batteries is
federating in the America and Europe with precise progress objectives.
3.5
Global Challenges of home appliances
Washers with a horizontal axis (front loading) are now used by most people in
Europe. They save water and energy, but will consumers in other part of the world
like Malaysia have interest in it
In refrigeration, it is mainly different climates (high air humidity requiring higher
energy) that set limits to further globalization

 In cooking appliances, the great differences in cooking habits and customs around
the world will result in the continuance of a wide variety of cooking appliances
Technology for more energy efficient motors for residential appliance motors is
advancing. Under research/development at present include:
Converter-optimized five phase permanent magnet (PM) synchronous
motors for HVAC, compressors, fans, washers and dryers.
High-speed fractional horsepower PM motors for electric hand tools and
lawn mowers.
4.
FINDINGS
Mobile applications of Metal-air batteries are very attractive as they come close to the
energy density that petroleum products currently provide. Thus, fundamental research on
batteries is now on track as an example the Batteries for Advanced Transportation
Technologies (BATT) Program is the premier fundamental research program in the
America for developing high-performance. Currently, ownership of electrical household
appliances, except for dishwashers and clothes dryers, has largely reached saturation,
while ownership of heating and air conditioning systems is still growing. Most heating
and cooling equipment is still of the single-room type. The advance technologies for
improving the domestic appliances processes are quite large to extend that home
appliances is an important factor in the costs of living, such technologies offer potential
significant competitive advantages. For this reason, advance technologies and processes
affect home appliances in two countervailing ways. They reduce demand by improving
efficiency and increase demand by increasing competitive advantages
5.
CONCLUSION
General Electric (GE) home appliance need to offer better quality, price, user-friendly,
flexibility and should require simple or zero instruction to operate. The current trends that
shape GE is safety, accessibility and environmental friendly of newly design household
appliances. The trend followed by home appliances and continuous improvement of them
is extremely important for reaching a sustainable manufacturing processes and
technological structure globally. One of the newer trends in GE is to optimize the
manufacturing processes of home appliances in order to adopt the latest technological
structure that can work more effectively. On the other hand, the expected trend for
General Electric home appliance design focuses on energy efficiency, flexibility and costeffectiveness. This technical paper faced a great challenge leading to critically analyzing
the data collected due to the fact that previous literatures focus point is totally different
when relating household appliance with respect to manufacturing processes and
technology.
6.
[1]

[2]
[3]

REFERENCES
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Nan Hu and Weiping Hu. A Brief Analysis on the Trend of Modern Household
Socket Design. IEEE 978-1-4244-7974-0110, 2010
Denison, Edward. Classification of sources of growth: Review of Income and

Wealth 18 (1), 1972

[4] Griliches, Zvi. Productivity, R&D, and the basic research at the firm level in the
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