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Scientists Invent Ultrasonic Dryer That Uses Sound To Dry Your Clothes (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have developed a dryer that could make doing laundry much quicker. Called the ultrasonic dryer, it's expected to be up to five times more energy efficient than most conventional dryers and able dry a large load of clothes in about half the time. Instead of using heat the way most dryers do, the ultrasonic dryer relies on high-frequency vibrations. Devices called green transducers convert electricity into vibrations, shaking the water from clothes. The scientists say that this method will allow a medium load of laundry to dry in 20 minutes, which is significantly less time than the average 50 minutes it takes in many heat-based machines. The drying technology also leaves less lint behind than normal dryers do, since the majority of lint is created when the hot air stream blows tiny fibers off of clothing. Drying clothes without heat also reduces the chance that their colors will fade. While the ultrasonic dryer has been in development for the past couple of years, the U.S. Department of Energy explains in a published video that it has recently been "developed into a full-scale press dryer and clothes dryer drum -- setting the stage for it to one day go to market through partners like General Electric Appliances."
First, it doesn't take 50 minutes to dry a large batch of wet clothes out of the washer, unless you just swirl them around in cold air with no ventilation, which is not how a traditional dryer works.
Second, the downside of this ultra-sound way of drying is that all the loose and torn fibers will stay in the clothes, and then shed in your home, some of which you will be breathing in, and it also means you'll have to do more vacuuming.
It is definitely and objectively better to blow the loose fibers out of the clothes with a traditional dryer and dispose of them. This crap is right up there with Teflon and other supposedly good inventions, that only serve to make you pay more, and let U.S. businesses own more custom by the way of patents. Do yourself a favor and stay with your traditional dryer.
Sound is a waveform. In air that results in a rapid change in air pressure... Moving air can dry clothes! AMAZING!
How does this appeal to me as a regular consumer
Depending on the frequency, this should drive your family dog totally insane.
I don't get this. I actually just put a load in the washer, and in three hours it'll be done (says the thing). Then I'll hang it all out to dry.
Now I understand that stateside having clothes hang outside is a sure sign of poverty. While I'm certainly not rich, there is no such stigma here. And anyway, clothing hangs pretty well on an indoors rack too. It just takes a night or so, which is fine by me. I even turn down the spin cycle speed to go easy on the clothes, something dryers very much don't do.
So while this ultranoisy thing is probably wonderful progress and everything, I don't really understand the problem in the first place. Maybe I'm just not first world enough.
1. Ultrasonic dryer
2. Ultrasonic washer (clothing, dishes)
3. Ultrasonic shower
4. Ultrasonic toilet and bidet
5. Water? You mean like in the bottles at the supermarket?
They had a commercial with several celebrities showing energy efficient appliances. "Which will be available soon." Jo Anne Worley proudly displayed a washer that worked with sound waves. Hence, not needing a dryer or detergent. Which was funny considering how many different detergents she did ads for. Whatever happened to that 'modern' marvel?
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Cool... cause it's not hot... Yes, I know. I can't resist, no matter how terrible the joke.
... my clothes are going to be dry any minute now.
It was stated it consumes less energy, does not produce unnecessary heat.. I get you are fine with your current machine, but why shouldn't we improve what we have?
even more efficient. OK: it doesn't work all year round where I live, so in cool months I hang my clothes on a drying rack in a spare room.
This is really a good which everyone need it. sanitary valve
Modulate the frequency with an audio input and your dryer can also play your favorite tunes. Now that I think about it, we can do the same with the microwave - similar concept; moving molecules at a high rate to generate heat.
Now if they could only figure out a way to keep my clothes 'just of the dryer' warm all day.
I think the term you're looking for is "Engineer". Not to diminish their prowess, that's cool and all. But FFS, this is Slashdot! If we don't get it right, who will?
There is this myth about million dollar NASA space pen and Russian one dollar pencil,
and there is this myth about Europeans drying their clothes on a one dollar clothesline.
I guess we really don't know how to spend all this free electricity laying around.
Technology is cool, but we really really need more energy. If you want to spend less of it, use the clothesline.
"Devices called green transducers." Really? I read the project PDF, and it mentions piezoelectric transducers plenty of times, but they aren't referred to as "green" anywhere, in fact the word "green" does not appear in the PDF at all. Where did the yahoo journalist get that from, and does it mean anything?
Haier is a Chinese company that bought GE Appliances last year, they still have plants in the U.S. There might be some American appliance makers left, but they all have foreign manufacturing facilities.
This will cut down on house fires, which is certainly good.
It's also progress towards something I've wanted for decades: An automatic closet. When I get undressed I want to just toss my clothes at the closet and have it launder, dry, and fold or hang them as appropriate, hopefully doing it quietly enough to not bother my sleep.
I actually don't mind the cleaning and drying part - just a robot to put them away would be awesome.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
This could also help with the cost of running AC in the summer, since you won't have heat waste affecting the temperature of your home.
So I wash my clothes, then run ultrasonics against/thru them to dry them. And I do this every week (or whatever).
What is the affect on the structural integrity of the fabric? Wouldn't prolonged exposure to intense vibration cause some fibers to break and knits to stretch? Would the ends of fibers tend to fray more quickly?
I don't think I'll be the first on my block to buy one.
In the meantime one could consider a heat-pump clothes dryer. Rather than using electricity or natural gas to heat indoor air, pass it over the clothes, then dump it to the outside in a once-through cycle, a heat-pump dryer uses (as you can guess) a heat pump. The hot side of the heat pump creates warm air that passes over the clothes gathering moisture. The cold side condenses the moisture back out, before passing this de-humidifed air back to the hot side.
Advantages:
Yes, they are more expensive. That is to be expected, considering how dirt-simple the mechanisms of a traditional dryer are. However, depending on your local electricity rates and how much laundry you do, the breakeven should be well within the lifetime of the appliance. Maybe that's not enough to junk a perfectly good existing dryer, but should definitely be considered when purchasing a replacement.
So the government develops this with our tax money, then grants exclusive patent use to a public corporation "partner" (GE)? Illegal or just unethical?
God damn marketing faggots... it's just a standard motherfucking ultrasonic transducer... Somebody need to gather up all these marketing morons and hang them from the nearest tree.
Is this going to be another fiasco like High Efficiency Washing Machines that used so little water they couldn't get soap out of the clothing? I mean, yeah, they "saved" water and electricity.... But when you have to wash the same set of clothes 3 or 4 times to get the soap out, and it takes 5+ hours to wash a single load, and you're running half loads of laundry at that to get it to rinse clean, and thus you're stuck doing laundry every single day of the week.... It really doesn't save as much electricity & water as you'd think...
I switched to a Speed Queen that can do a load, a full load, in 35 minutes. I now do an entire weeks worth of laundry in just 1 morning. And it actually gets my laundry clean, soap rinsed out and all. They tell me it's inefficient in terms of water & electricity, but I saw MY water & electricity bills go noticeably DOWN after I made the switch.
You're mileage may vary, but I'm a little skeptical of this new tech.
It's seems like they're firing the talented engineers, bringing in kids straight out of college, or H1-B folks, or offshoring, producing utter crap, and nobody cares if it actually works as long as the suits get their "it's efficient" tagline and can redeem their stock options before folks realize they've been had.
Sounds like a great idea!
Never knowing the joy and warmth of putting on trousers straight from the dryer on a chilly morning.
Would you have Rosie get my suit out of the ultrasonic dryer for me? And tell Elroy to pick up his room. I'm going to walk the dog.
Lint build-up in dryer vents is a common source of home fires, so maybe a dryer that creates less lint would reduce the chance of a fire, and in turn public safety? Of course dryer vent/lint fires typically occur because homeowners are negligent in cleaning vents out, BUT if this could remove or reduce long-term dryer vent cleaning effort/cost that would be another benefit. I'm just speculating, of course...
This is better for Space Travel as Hot stuff in Space might not be so cool.
I don't know what quantifies as medium, but my medium loads take under half an hour.
I've invented a new method of drying clothes too, and it used NO electricity.
I call my invention the clothes line. Stop by www.iamtoocoolforslashdot.com to order.
I once had the misfortune of having to work in a room that contained several large ultrasonic cleaners. Even with their covers closed, the noise drove me crazy in short order.
Such a dryer would need a lot of soundproofing.
They ran some small-scale experiments with flat fabric samples on a huge transducer, then they stuck some transducers into a drum and imply that somehow they can make it scale. If this ever works (and that's doubtful), it will take tens of millions of dollars to develop. What a waste of $880000 of public funding.
You want energy efficient drying? That's really simple: hang your clothes up on a line. If you need it faster, wear synthetics.
Has anyone done a study of long term effects of prolonged exposure to ultrasonic waves? We humans have a habit of producing something to sell without consideration of long term consequences to the environment...or ourselves.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Move.
If you're so smart, why didn't you invent the ultrasonic dryer?
After drying cloths, the next steps are washing clothes and showering people like the sonic showers on Star Trek.
Have gnu, will travel.
...I never imagined that even the looniest of loons could come up with such a incredibly lame issue such as the idiocy you are spewing here.
Is this all a conspiracy by some agency to make money off of people who will suddenly be afflicted with Laundry Lung?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There was a story a few days ago about a copper mesh that pulled moisture out of the air to create drinking water in the desert. Sounds to me that could be combined with this to further pull moisture from the clothes, maybe make the drum out of the wunderstuff and use the ultrasonics to shake the water from the drum.
Nullius in verba
For all you know, GP AC works at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
A conventional heated clothes dryer is the first step in bedbug eradication. Guess you can just trash the clothes...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Q. Has GE decide how they plan to control the transmission and distribution of fine dust and bacteria?
My mother had 4 children (and a husband) so loads of wash per week, and used a drying rack for years. You can get one for extremely cheap, and yes you can leave it out or in as you have place. But it definitively made it easier for her to have an electric dryer.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
So... okay, first, there's this: my gym has this dryer for swim-suits mounted on the wall. Instead of ROTATING, it instead swirls, by which I mean that the entire tub is moved without rotation in tight little circles, VERY rapidly, and this manages, without heat, (or at least, without applying any meaningful amount of heat to the clothing, to squeeze the VAST majority of the water out of them, in about 10 to 15 seconds). It makes this cool, loud, deep buzzing noise too... it's rather like a washer that is badly out of balance, but designed to operate that way, and has an interior about the size of a one-gallon paint can. (It's not ultrasonic, I know, before you ask; when opening it, I can see the oscillation come to an abrupt, but not instantaneous halt. The clothes or towel or whatever is kind of plastered to the inside of the little metal basket inside. So why we don't have machines like these to do, oh... about 80 or 90 percent of the work drying clothes is beyond me.
More importantly, (and secondly,) why we need separate devices to wash and dry, or wash and oscillate the water out, or wash, then oscillate, THEN dry the clothes, is something I'll never quite understand. These could EASILY be made into a single device. You could just load your clothes, soap, fabric softener, and set the thing, turn it on, and it would beep or ding or buzz or whatever, or, better yet, E-MAIL YOU!, when your clothes are done! Additionally, there's better ways than using a direct, resistive load to dry things, since that's the least efficient way possible to do the job, under the laws of thermodynamics. Why not use a heat PUMP instead, and pass the air going INTO the chamber with the clothes, and coming out, over the sides of the heat pump, to CONDENSE the water out of the air, instead of having to blow it, and not a small amount of HEAT, OUT of the house, condo, apartment, or what-have-you.
With smart appliances, it'd be like, "BING!" Oh, hey, I got an e-mail from Whirled Electric Haus, or whatever, saying, "Your clothing is done, nice, clean, and dry," and if you want, it could even add stats, such as amount of water used or saved, watt-hours of electricity used, or again saved, using your account's profile or app configured with whatever you USED to use, or WERE going to use, to do your laundry, to see how much more your previous solution would have cost in water and electric, and maybe additional soap... it could also tell you when it'll be done by, and when it's done, THAT it's done, so you know your clothes are clean, dry, and ready to be removed. Or instead of e-mails, it could just be accessed by an app, and you could use your smartphone or tablet, or maybe just go to a website using an html interface, to learn these things.
A Raspberry Pi costs like, 35 bucks, so there's little excuse for most major appliances not incorporating one of these, or something similar, if they don't already, and using the wi-fi feature to configure things, and having to have separate devices for two of these tasks, and having them STILL be as inefficient as they currently are, just seems appallingly stone-aged in this, the alleged twenty-first century.
"It's damn-near the Jetsons up in this motherfucker!" ~ Chris Rock on stage, and oh, that was YEARS AGO!
Seriously, it's 2017 and I still have to drag my clothes all around the house to wash and dry them. What can't that just happen in my closet? On hangers?
Same thing with dishes -- why do they have to go into the dishwasher? Why can't I just put them back into the cupboard and turn it on?
Come on, science, I'm inconvenienced still. Make it so.
Better use a 100 ton hydraulic press and liquid nitrogen !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
aaaaaaa
Ultrasound transducers produce ultrasonic waves by changing size in concert with an electrical signal oscillating at ultrasonic frequencies. This creates compression waves in the liquid which 'tear' the liquid apart, leaving behind many millions of microscopic 'voids' or 'partial vacuum bubbles' (cavitation). These bubbles collapse with enormous energy; temperatures and pressures on the order of 8,000 F and 20,000 lbs per square inch. The implosion of the cavitation bubble also results in liquid jets of up to 900 feet per second. Granted the bubbles are really fucking small and only last for a tiny fraction of a second, they still wreck shit with authority. Any item you put in such a machine that was made of a petroleum byproduct could or WOULD degas toxic, flammable and/or explosive compounds and ruin your day in a big way! Who are these people foisting this baloney on the world?
"scientists" don't invent clothes dryers, engineers do.
So how is this ultrasonic cleaning not a scam in the same vein as ion cleaning and magnet cleaning and crystal cleaning and nano cleaning?
Even Popular Mechanics, long known for being too slow to deliver the news, told us about Oak Ridge National Laboratory's ultrasonic clothes dryer back in 2015!
You know we have had the technology to make ultrasonic clothes and dish washers for decades now (same tech as jewelry cleaners). You know why we don't have them? Because they work so well, they don't even need any detergent, and so all the detergent companies would go out of business. Oh, and they are also much more efficient as well (less water, less hot water, less electricity, etc.).
Maybe this has a better chance, unless the fabric softener cartel hears of it....
-RoS
P.S. - I was looking through the thread about the indoor vs. outdoor clothes drying argument. Has anyone brought up the problem of the damage UV rays will do to some clothing? I don't know, maybe the EU people like lighter colored clothing.
There was something I read a long time ago that commented on the amount of germs on your clothes that survive a standard wash cycle which aren't killed off until the heat from the dryer does them in. I don't remember what the numbers were and am not sure how accurate the information was, but it was reasonably high and made sense at the time. I can understand that clothesline drying might kill off a similar amount due to direct sunlight exposure... But ultrasonic drying wouldn't have neither of those affects. I would think for it to be effective at killing the germs you would still need some kind of UV source inside the unit.
Your boring outdated wardrobe can finally get a makeover!
It's just the culture (or bylaws) that prevent it from happening.
I live in Hong Kong, an extremely densely populated city. Most people live in high-rise buildings, and have very tight living space. Pretty much everyone here still hangs clothes outside. Windows are designed with a rack for hanging clothes. Nobody cares if they see your underwear on the side of the building.
Hanging clothes to dry inside can create excessive moisture, which can result in mould.
Phew. For a minute, I was afraid you were going to tell us that they had invented an ultrasonic dryer that uses x-rays to dry clothes. Sound is a much better thing for an ultrasonic device to use.
Somebody's got to have complaints about this, plausible or imaginary or deliberate B.S. I'm not creative enough to think of what will come, but here's some possibilities to get you started.
Ultrasonic dryers will damage dogs' hearing.
Ultrasonic dryers will be annoying to dogs, and set off a wave of barking in the neighborhood.
Ultrasonic dryers will damage human hearing.
Ultrasonic dryers will be marginally-detectable by children and teens. They will flee the house when laundry chores are being done.
Ultrasonic dryers will cause autism.
Ultrasonic dryers will cause vaccination.
Ultrasonic dryers will be too expensive for the poor, leading to an "ultrasonic dry gap". Press conferences, marches, and legislation will result.
Ultrasonic dryers will not be recyclable.
So, what'd I miss?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
This new device can also alleviate kidney stones.
And, also cleans dentures well!
Just another move forward toward home medical appliances!
I wonder if cottons will still shrink?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.