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Dyson Airblade

Several years ago, Dyson, the British company famed for its vacuum cleaners, made a foray into uncharted commercial territory. The result—the Dyson Airblade—is revolutionary for its ability to shed water off skin using air pressure alone, saving energy by eliminating the need for heat, not to mention countless paper towels.

Dyson’s 120,000-square-foot research-and-development facility in Wiltshire, England, is where it all began.

dyson airblade digital motor

Concept

In 2004, Dyson was exploring new ways to use its patented Dyson digital motor (DDM), which contains a virtually frictionless setup and was developed to make small vacuum cleaners for the Japanese market. The design team soon hooked the DDM up with an air knife, a technology in which air is forced quickly through a very small space. “We were playing around in the laboratory,” company founder James Dyson recounts of the attempts to apply the air knife to a top-secret project. “Air knives have all sorts of uses: smoothing things, flattening them out,” he hints. But, whatever they were trying to do, it wasn’t working.

Inventors have long exalted failure. Thomas Edison famously said, “I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” At Dyson, frustration yielded a serendipitous lightbulb moment when someone’s hands happened to be wet and the air knife dried them brilliantly. As a hand-drying solution for public restrooms, it had the poten-tial to be both more effective and energy efficient, as it did not require heat. “Our objective then became to literally scrape water off hands like a wiper blade does,” senior design manager John Churchill recalls. “We had to optimize the delivery of air, and finding the balance between airflow and pressure took a lot of failures.”
 

dyson airblade silicone hands

Research

Research in air filtration and house-hold cleanliness had already led Dyson to build an in-house testing laboratory overseen by microbiologist Toby Saville. “There wasn’t an established set of standards for hand dryness, so we had to deduce them,” Churchill says. Three questions directed the team’s inquiries:

(1) How dry is dry? Churchill says of the first test: “We had people dry their hands to their own standard with paper towels. We found dryness to be when there is 0.1 gram of water left on your hands.”

(2) Is drying necessary? Saville found the answer to be a definitive yes: Volunteers briefly handled a raw chicken, washed their hands using a medical protocol, and dried them to various degrees. The data showed that damp hands carry up to 1,000 times more bacteria than dry ones.

(3) Will people really dry their hands? The team set up video cameras in public restrooms to observe hand-dryer use. Barring the remarkable portion of people who skip hand washing altogether, those who dry do so in a hurry. Most of the people observed held their hands under a hot-air blower for about ten seconds, gave up, and finished the job using their clothes.

dyson airblade foam model

Prototyping

With the technology to produce a 400-mph wind capable of drying a person’s hands in 12 seconds, the next step was to design a shell. Starting with cardboard and foam models, the team devised the shape as a waist-high, wall-mounted scoop into which users dip their hands to activate the sensor then slowly raise them while the air wicks away wetness.

Dyson’s aerodynamics specialists optimized the design for laminar flow—–the streamlined movement of air. Held inside the hand dryer’s outer gray casing, the laminar flow chamber carries the air from the motor up the nozzle and out the 0.3-mm slot, resulting in a shape that resembles a science-fiction robot’s underwear.

Engineers made more than 200 prototypes, refining the shape and functionality along the way with an unlimited budget. “The air nozzle parts for just one machine cost $13,050,” Churchill recalls. One contributing factor: “We made them out of bluestone, a material used by Formula One teams, because of the tolerance and heat-resistance requirements,” he says.

That wasn’t the only pricey part. Two selective laser sintering (SLS) machines were constantly humming, laser-bonding nylon powder, as fine as baby powder, into 0.15-mm layers, at a cost of $35 per pound of powder.

dyson airblade portrait engineer

Manufacturing

Though technology has made prototyping much faster, it requires an under-standing of how rapid-prototyping materials behave compared to manufacturing materials. “If the SLS nylon fails in certain ways, we can tell how that will relate to the actual plastic’s performance,” Churchill says. “The SLS prototyping was particularly helpful with the ducting components, where air is blown into the air knives. The early SLS ducting models cracked quite easily, so we knew we needed to use plastics that would sustain expansion and contraction.”

Dyson manufactured an initial run of 300 machines to be bashed, broken, and tested in every possible capacity. The company does most of its testing in Malaysia in a large facility where most of its vacuum cleaners are made, primarily in hard plastics such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). The casings of the first Airblades were made of die-cast aluminum for extra durability, and because a die-casting tool weighs as much as a double-decker bus, Dyson sought out the help of a China-based specialist.

The company has since perfected the Airblade in an ABS-polycarbonate plastic blend. In the Wiltshire facility, a finished hand dryer recently sat in a cage, being repeatedly whacked by an enormous swinging mallet. “Imagine the abuse it takes in a pub,” one engineer said. One has yet to crack.

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