A group of Electrical Engineering Professors from KFUPM led by the department Liaison officer Dr. Mohammad S. Sharawi visited the headquarters of General Electric (GE) – Bently Nevada company in Khobar on 23 Octber 2011. The group of professors included Dr. Munir Al-Absi and Prof. Zakariyya Al-Hamouz including Dr. Mohammad S. Sharawi. The visit discussed various aspects of collaboration between the company and the EE department specially in the areas of Instrumentation and Electrical Machine diagnostics and monitoring.
GE managers and field engineers expressed their enthusiasm in collaborating with the department at both the academic and research sides. They have offered to make presentations within some of our courses that fit within their technology to show the students real life examples of operating equipment in the areas of instrumentation and machine fault diagnostics and monitoring. They have also offered to donate a small setup that can be used in the Instrumentation laboratory for senior project design as well as course related experiments. GE managers showed their interest in having more EE COOP students to train within their facilities and they even showed interest in helping graduate students in getting them real time data for their work on their machines.
It is worth mentioning that GE based equipment for electric machines and motors currently occupies more than 80% of the market share. All of major Saudi companies such as ARAMCO, SABIC, among others use GE based equipment in their facilities, which makes it a big advantage to our students to get exposed to their technology in their undergraduate and graduate education at the EE department at KFUPM.
