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."

Comments

Fido

[QA]

Depending on the frequency, this should drive your family dog totally insane.

Re:Fido

[Anonymous Coward]

Insane, but very,very dry.

Re:Fido

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

As long as it reduces the dog drying time. 20 minutes in the dryer leaves him disoriented and almost always up to no good...pissing on the floor, eating shoes, etc.

Re:Don't buy this

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how my lungs are doing now that I've worn hang-dried clothes with all those evil fibers for decades...

American problem is American

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:American problem is American

[ledow]

Spoken like a true American.

Re:American problem is American

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains a lot why the average power consumption in the US is 11MWh compared to a meager 4-6MWh in the EU. The longer washing cycles use much less energy.

Why would you care about how long it would take? You don't have to watch it to completion!

Re:American problem is American

[hab136]

Why shouldn't a washer take 3 hours, if it uses less electricity and less water to do so? I'd rather have my washer take more time and cost less. It's got a timer anyways, so those 3 hours can be whenever I want, including right before I wake up, or right before I arrive home from work.

Unless you're doing more than 7 loads a week, the amount of time the washer takes doesn't really matter. Take out the previous day's load, load up the next day's load, set the timer, and you're done for the day.

Re:American problem is American

[OzPeter]

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.

In the county where I am in the US there are by-laws that prohibit hanging washing outside*, and from what I understand this is not uncommon.

  In addition there are by-laws that prohibit using furniture and items that were intended for inside use, from being used outside your house. I assume this was to stop people putting old couches on their front porch. But a few years ago a local was prosecuted for using an old bath tub as a planter in their backyard. The kicker was that you couldn't see the bath tub from the street.

Home of the free. Yeah, right.

* And at this time of the year you wouldn't want to hang your clothe outside. There is so much pollen flying around that your clothes would be unrecognizable.

Re:American problem is American

[Parker Lewis]

This comment is so self-centered. You're assuming everyone is a single person, home user, with enough space to hang clothes outside, good weather every day and no need of clothes in few hours. Can you realize that in some areas, like big cities, people lives in so tiny buildings with no space for hanging (and some buildings have rules banning this)? That several countries, weather is not friendly for this at all? That when you have a family with several members (mainly if you have more than one baby), time is really important for clothes drying? And, if you're a laundry, time and efficiency are fuc*ing important!

Re:American problem is American

[bill_mcgonigle]

If they don't realize the odor, it's not strong enough to worry about.

When it comes to tech nerds, that's almost always entirely untrue.

Re:American problem is American

[Gryle]

Driers are useful when the conditions outside aren't amenable to drying clothing. For example, if the outside temperature is below freezing, which is common in many places for at least one month out of the year, clothing turns into icicles. Or if it's raining outside. Or if it's early spring and the local farmers are spreading manure in their fields in preparation for the spring harvest, and you don't want your clothing to smell like manure after a few hours outside. (For the record, I have no objection to living near farmers who use manure. I just keep my windows closed at certain times of the day and don't hang my laundry out to dry.)

As for interior, my current apartment doesn't have room for me to put a drying rack anywhere that I won't trip over it.

There are valid reasons for someone to own a drier and not hang their clothing outside.

Re:American problem is American

[RobinH]

If you make $50,000 a year at a 2000 hour per year job, you make $25 per hour, and let's say after tax that's... maybe $18 an hour. That's somewhat typical. I'll be generous and say it only takes you an extra 10 minutes to hang a load and go get it off the line later. That's a sixth of an hour, which should be worth $3 to you in after-tax income. I happen to have an energy monitor installed at my panel, and I can tell you that it takes less than 25 cents of electricity to dry a load. Obviously this varies by where you live, but it's certainly going to be less than $1. Much less than that if you use a gas dryer. We do at least 4 loads a week, typically 5 as we're a family of 5, so that's a savings of around $10 per week, so over $500 per year in time savings. My electric dryer is over 15 years old and it's a very basic two-cycle with moisture sensor type, so probably cost less than $500 new. I think it's a no-brainer to use a clothes dryer.

Re:American problem is American

[Solandri]

I've done it all three ways - hanging outdoors, hanging indoors, and a dryer. The dryer by far produces the best results. Most clothes come out not needing ironing. And in Winter, the energy used by the dryer to produce heat also heats your home so its energy use is not entirely wasteful. (In Summer you just close the laundry room door so the extra heat doesn't add to your air conditioning bill).

Hanging outdoors is second best, but results in crinkled clothes which need ironing (eliminating a good chunk of the energy savings of not using a dryer since you dry everything at once, but iron one at a time). If you've got a family of 4, it takes a lot of space. That forces you to wash/dry in multiple small loads instead of a few big ones, which wastes more energy and requires more labor. And of course weather and particulate matter (pollen, smog) can dirty your "clean" clothes before you've even worn them.

Hanging indoors is worst. All the problems of hanging outdoors, but less space so more loads, more crinkling since you typically don't use clothespins to stretch the clothes out, longer drying time, and picks up household odors. It also increases the humidity of the air indoors, which cools the air so increases your heating bill in the Winter. In Summer, if you're in a low-humidity environment (desert) this cooling can be helpful; but in high-humidity climates it just increases your air conditioning bill because humid air feels hotter (sweating is less effective) forcing you to run the air conditioner more.

But overall, I'd say the biggest factor is reduction of labor. Instead of taking 15-30 minutes clipping everything to the line or rack, you just shove all the clothes into the dryer in 1 minute, turn it on, and go do something else. (Unloading time is about the same for both since you have to fold the clothes.)

Re:American problem is American

[plague911]

European's also have a much lower GDP per person. Anecdotally because they spend much more time doing the work an American does in a fraction of the time.

Re:American problem is American

[Grishnakh]

Europeans manage to dry their clothes just fine with all the conditions you've listed.

So how exactly do they manage to dry clothes when 1) it's raining outside, and rains every day in fact (as in the Pacific Northwest), 2) it's snowing outside, or 3) it's below freezing outside (which is common in the winter in many parts of the US), or 4) it's 100% humidity outside (which is normal in the southeast US during the summer)?

Back in the 1970's (when dinosaurs ruled)...

[magusxxx]

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?

Re:Don't buy this

[GrumpySteen]

here are no tangible benefits to using a crazy ultrasound dryer.

"up to five times more energy efficient than most conventional dryers"

It's the second sentence in the summary for god's sake. You didn't even have to click the link or read the article to get to it.

Cool

[s_p_oneil]

Cool... cause it's not hot... Yes, I know. I can't resist, no matter how terrible the joke.

Re:Don't buy this

[religionofpeas]

It is definitely and objectively better to blow the loose fibers out of the clothes with a traditional dryer and dispose of them

How many of those fibers were already loose, compared to the ones that get broken off by all the friction in the dryer ?

The fate of the fibers

[PuddleBoy]

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.

Re:The fate of the fibers

[Verdatum]

No. That's the fascinating thing about ultrasonics. It's got a strong effect on fluids, but a minimal impact on intertwined solids. Line-drying is still likely to be better on delicate fabrics, but ultrasonics are going to be way gentler than hot-air tumble-drying. I'm not saying that this is a marketable solution, and yeah, bleeding-edge early adopters deserve every problem they get, but the frequencies and amplitudes used aren't any good at pulling apart fibers (and that's part of why ultrasonic clothes washing isn't feasible).

Alternate technology, available today

[necro81]

I applaud developing new technologies for energy efficiency. Still, it's going to be a while before this is available.

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:

• * Uses 1/2 the electricity of an ordinary dryer
• * It has no vent to the outdoors, so the whole home envelope can be that much tighter. (It does have a water drain for the condensate.)
• * The mechanism relies on warm, de-humidified air, rather than heavily heated air, so it is more gentle on clothes
• * They've been available as consumer products for a number of years now - it's not brand new technology

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.

Re:Don't buy this

[thegarbz]

This is very much like the asbestos hysteria. OMG my child is at a school which has an asbestos wall, they'll all die in 40 years!!!!! No. The fibres are inside a sealed bonded sheet. Don't disturb it, don't attempt to remove it, keep it well maintained (reads: painted) and you'll be fine.

Re:Don't buy this

[hipp5]

So instead 'green pans' and 'copper pans' are all the rage.

To be fair, those green pans where they use a ceramic lining instead of Teflon are actually really amazing. They are wayyyy harder to scratch and just as non-stick. I will never buy a teflon pan again, and I'm not someone who cares at all about the whole fear-mongering.