Why not just use a vacuum pump and pull the water vapor out at a constant temperature. You can flow 33C dry air (use a condenser before expanding and heating, if you like) across the clothes as they tumble to keep them from freezing.<p>You wouldn't have to pump below a 10% of an atmosphere to quickly dry your clothes (vapor pressure of water is 5% of an atmosphere at that temp).<p>To give an idea of how fast:
With a 1liter/sec STP air intake, you would extract ~1gram/sec of water so in 15min you would remove ~1kg of water.
A bit puzzled why GE needs government funding to do research -- they make a lot of money already.<p>The idea sounds pretty neat but I wonder about longevity of the piezeoelectric transducers. A clothes dryer needs to last at least 7-10 years, minimum. A resistive heating element is about as simple as you can get, and it's cheap to replace if it does burn out.
> At the end of the project, appliance manufacturers including GEA will be ready to invest in this technology and commercialize it. This will result in the U.S. becoming the leader in the clothes drying industry and generate new jobs and innovative applications of the technology.<p>Pretty sure as soon as China is aware of this idea (if not already), they will have something in production and out the door faster and at a much larger scale than the US. Could someone explain why innovative ideas like this have to be published <i>before</i> they're actually built?
What's the effect on the clothes themselves? I won't let anything but underwear, gym clothes, socks, and tees in a dryer because it's generally considered bad for them. I hang dry all of my wovens.
And how will my cat react to this thing? Something with enough sonic energy to vaporize a significant volume of water is probably loud enough to wake every animal in the area.
The demonstration seems to assume that physical contact is possible. For layered clothes it may not work that well, if at all.
But! Even if we assume there's no progress in that area, I can still see this being used in an industrial laundry. I've worked in one and there are machines specialized for different types of garments. With automation, it may actually make economic sense.
So while use in a consumer market may seem far out, industrial applications are still possible.
Electric ceiling fan in a small room dries a stand full of clothes in 4-5 hours in a 70%RH climate and costs a LOT less than drum dryers and is safer for the garments.
The video showed a small bit of fabric touching the transducer. I'm not sure how well it's going to work with a big heap of jeans, jumpers and the like.
Depending on the ultrasonic frequency used, and the spacing of seams/tailoring of the clothes, it's possible that some clothes will come out of the dryer in pieces, and you will have to sew them back together... Although I suspect wide availability of these dryer will quickly eliminate that kind of sewing, much like the prevalence of dishwashers has almost eliminated non-dishwasher-safe kitchen stuff.
> DOE’s Building Technologies Office is seeking new clothes dryer technologies that can increase the energy factor (EF) from 3.7 to 5.43 lb/kWh without increasing drying time by more than 20% over baseline units.<p>They're concentrating too much on kWh. One could use the same technology and focus on variable electricity pricing. I want a dryer that I turn at night, and it dynamically turns on-and-off as electricity rates go up and down. It ends at a smooth tumble in the morning so I can put on my day's clothes and fold the rest at it's lowest wrinkle-point.
I want to see a study done on such a devices safety. The sound waves it emit are able to desiccate clothing. What is the effect of these sound waves escaping the device? Would it desiccate living tissue?
If these go mainstream it would be thousands of times more handy to the small shop then for cloths. Vibratory cleaners with that kind of volume are crazy expensive!
The logical next leap is to cook food with ultrasound which will hopefully be somewhat faster than conventional cooking and less harmful (no protein denaturing [1]) than microwave cooking<p>1. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11088227" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11088227</a>
Ultrasonic Dryer? Who needs this?
And DOE dropped nearly a million on it? Was it an SBIR grant with nice kickbacks? :-)<p>I found a washing machine with ultrasonic much more interesting:<p><a href="http://www.tovatech.com/blog/3759/ultrasonic-cleaner/ultrasonic-washing-machine-looks-like-it-is-available-in-japan" rel="nofollow">http://www.tovatech.com/blog/3759/ultrasonic-cleaner/ultraso...</a><p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/21/dolfi-washing-device_n_6510494.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/21/dolfi-washing-devic...</a><p>Would be a little worried about stress on your clothes AND/OR Ears. <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/sounds-you-cant-hear-can-still-hurt-your-ears" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/sounds-you-cant-hear-...</a>