R&D/innovation

Siemens, GE Partner With Open-Source Innovation Community

Siemens and GE are among the companies discovering the power of an open-source innovation community to offer solutions for significant oil and gas industry challenges, such as improved corrosion monitoring.

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GE Fuse/Launch Forth

Siemens PLM Software and Launch Forth are partnering to empower and educate the future workforce by offering free professional CAD software to a co-creation community of 185,000 innovators that are focused on product development, idea generation, and creating solutions for challenges both big and small.

As businesses and lines of work trend toward a global gig economy, Siemens and Launch Forth hope to enable and support the future workforce by providing them with the tools and tutorials they need to learn and grow within their career. According to Forbes, 57.3 million people make up the freelance community in the US alone.

“Our members grapple every day with challenging problems in engineering and industrial design. Allowing them the opportunity to gain free access to this Siemens software will only further their ability to pursue transformative solutions that will not just change industries, but change the world,” said Elle Shelley, executive vice president of Launch Forth. “Solid Edge, with synchronous technology, is a perfect fit for our co-creation community because it offers members the unique ability to seamlessly import CAD data from any system, regardless of where it was originally created, and edit it as if it were a native file.”

Members of the Launch Forth community will receive an exclusive version of Siemens Solid Edge software called the Launch Forth Community Edition. This version will be full-featured with unlimited usage, but will watermark any exported 2D files.

Solid Edge is a portfolio of software tools that address all aspects of the product development process—3D design, simulation, manufacturing, and data management. It combines direct modeling with the flexibility and control of parametric design made possible with synchronous technology.

Philipp Tietjen, Siemens director of strategic initiatives for mainstream engineering, said the company “will provide subject matter experts to engage with Launch Forth Members to help offer guidance in using the Solid Edge software as well as tips and tricks in the forms of videos that can be posted within specific projects on the platform.”

San Francisco-based Launch Forth, an enterprise-level SaaS platform, is powered by an open-innovation community of more than 185,000 solvers. Members participate in projects sponsored by enterprise-level clients including HP Inc., General Electric Co., Local Motors, and Airbus from anywhere in the world on their own time. Within these projects, members have an opportunity to collaborate with minds from around the world, team up to work together to solve perplexing issues, compete for prizes by submitting their own ideas, models, and solutions while also building their professional reputation.

Since its inception, Launch Forth has tested the ability of a shared community membership model to develop never-before-seen products and revolutionary ideas in the industrial testing, home appliance, and consumer electronics industries.

The Siemens software will be given to all Launch Forth members.

Brainstorming for Oil and Gas Solutions

Fuse, GE’s open-source platform, collaborated with Launch Forth in 2017 for ideas to improve the corrosion monitoring of pipes by issuing a design challenge for high-temperature clamps. The goal was to design a clamping system that consistently maintains a minimum downward force on ultrasound probes to the surface of a pipe at temperatures as high as 400°C. GE explained that the sensors are intended to remain in contact for 10 years with the contact between the sensor and the pipe maintained for the entire period to improve field engineer safety and achieve more accurate corrosion monitoring and fewer pipe service interruptions.

The winners of the challenge submitted designs for a modular clamp system, a superclamp superelastic clamp, and an anytime and adaptive ultrasonic testing high-temperature clamp.

Other projects have included position sensors for inspection probes, detecting corrosion under insulation, and detecting weld seams.