this is both wild sufficient to be confused as a conspiracy theory as well as typical sense sufficient to be the huge solution staring us in the deal with which nobody realized. up until now. Oak Ridge national lab as well as general electric (GE), working on a grant from the US department of energy (DOE), have been playing around with new clothes dryer innovation since 2014 as well as have include something new as well as exciting. clothes dryers that utilize ultrasonic traducers to eliminate wetness from wardrobe instead of utilizing heat.

If you’ve ever seen a awesome mist humidifier you’ll understand exactly how this works. A piezo aspect produces ultrasonic waves that atomize water as well as humidify the air. This is precisely the exact same except the water is kept in clothing, rather than a reservoir. when it’s atomized it can be eliminated with traditional air movement.

This is a totally obvious application of the simple as well as affordable technology — when the garment is laying flat on a bed of transducers. This can be implemented in a press drying system where a garment is laid flat on a bed or transducers as well as one more bed hinges down from above. Poof, your shirt is dry in a few seconds.

But private households don’t have these type of dryers. They have what are called drum dryers that spin the clothes. reading closely, this piece of the puzzle is still to come:

They play [sic] to scale-up the technoloogy to press drying as well as ultimately a clothes dryer drum in the next five months.

We look at this as having a similar technological hurdle as wireless electricity. There must be an inverse-square legislation on the impact of the ultrasonic waves to atomize water as the water moves further away from the transducers. It that’s the case, tranducers on the circumference of a drum would be inefficient at drying the garments toward the center. This slide deck hints that that issue is being addressed. It talks about only running the transducers when the material is physically coupled with the elements. It’s an fascinating application as well as we hope that it could work in conjunction with traditional drying techniques to boost energy savings, even if this doesn’t pan out as a overall replacement.

With a vast population, cost adds up fast. There are approximately 125 M households in the United States and the overwhelming majority of them utilize clothes dryers (while many other parts of the world have a higher portion who hang-dry their clothing). The DOE estimates $9 billion a year is spent on drying clothes in the US. reducing that number by even 1/10th of 1% will pay off more than tenfold the $880,000 research study budget plan that went into this. Of course, you have to attire those households with new devices which will take at least 8-12 years with natural attrition, even if ultrasonics hit the market as soon as possible.

There is a lot of space for new concepts on saving energy as well as resources while washing as well as drying clothes. working on this challenge would make a fantastic Hackaday prize entry. As it so happens, just last year we saw a technique that leveraged arid desert air as a warm source for drying.

[via reddit via Yahoo Finance]