ORNL receives interest from appliance makers on dryer that uses vibrations, rather than heat

 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has received significant interest from appliance manufacturers who could enter into an agreement to continue developing the technology to build a dryer that uses vibrations, rather than heat, to dry clothes.

The cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, could develop the technology into a full-scale commercial product.

This month, Oak Ridge Today asked about the current status of the project, which has been highlighted by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. An earlier announcement had said that the project term was from October 1, 2014, to September 30, 2016.

Omar Abdelaziz of ORNL said DOE has continued to fund this work and will fund the laboratory’s efforts in the upcoming CRADA.

In May 2016, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that ORNL scientists are changing the way Americans do laundry—using vibrations instead of heat to dry their clothes. The new technology, called the ultrasonic clothes dryer, is expected to dry clothes in half the time and use 70 percent less energy than today’s products, saving American consumers money on their energy bills.

At that time, with support from the Energy Department’s Building Technologies Office, ORNL and GE Appliances were in the process of scaling up the technology to a press dryer and clothes dryer drum within the next five months.

“This is going to be a game-changing technology,” said Ayyoub Momen, the ORNL scientist who developed the prototype. “Clothes dryers consume a lot of energy.”

Nearly 80 percent of U.S. households have clothes dryers, DOE said. Combined, they consume 4 percent of all residential electricity use, and cost Americans nearly $9 billion per year on their utility bills. This is because they rely on an inefficient process that hasn’t seen significant innovation in decades—using electricity to heat the air and evaporate the water out of clothes.

“Evaporating water takes a lot of energy,” Momen said. “That’s mainly because of the latent heating process in conventional dryers.”

ORNL and GE took an entirely new approach to this traditional process by using high-frequency vibrations, instead of heat, to remove the water from the fabric with minimal lint generation. The technology uses piezoelectric transducers that contract and expand when voltage is added. By using a custom amplifier, the transducers—a device that converts electricity to vibration—vibrate at a high frequency turning the water into a cool mist as it’s removed from the fabric, DOE said.

“The first results were mind blowing,” Momen said. “We could dry a piece of fabric in just 14 seconds. If you wanted to do that in an oven at different temperatures, it would take several minutes.”

The ultrasonic dryer is expected to cut drying time to about 20 minutes per load­, down significantly from the average 50 minutes it currently takes Americans to dry their laundry. The success of this project will position the United States as the leader in the clothes drying industry, generating new jobs and innovative applications of the technology.

For more information visit the Building Technologies Office’s project page for the ultrasonic dryer.

More information will be added as it becomes available.

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