General Electric adaptive weld control feedback timing failure

Same engagement as above, but specifically the technical finding — the adaptive controller's response lag (six cycles) exceeded the weld duration (four cycles). Tom presents this finding in front of GE Lynn's boss and the GE Research engineer who admits "we fixed that last week."

I go off to Japan, and Gordon and Carl, my students, are working on this, and I get back from Japan thirteen months later. It turns out that Gordon and Carl had figured out — they had sent me notes while I was over in Japan — that General Electric Research would not tell us anything about the system. We found out very quickly that General Electric Lynn had cut the million dollars a year of funding from General Electric Research for having spent seven million dollars and not having a product yet. They hired us as the whipping boys to punish General Electric Research. So Gordon and Carl had to go into this seven-million-dollar system and figure out the software on their own. They actually didn't even have access to it. All they could do was run experiments. They ran some experiments and did some tests, and they concluded that — even though this is 60-cycle current and you're supposed to control it in four cycles of current, one fifteenth of a second — the adaptive controller wasn't even kicking in until like six cycles after the weld was over. It was trying to adapt the weld.