A dryer which dries your laundry quicker without using a lot of electricity has been invented by an Indian-origin researcher Viral Patel and his team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US.
Patel along with a team of researchers have developed an ultrasonic dryer with technology that uses no heat at all and is able dry a large load of clothes in about half the time.
"It is a completely new approach. Instead of evaporation, it's technically performing mechanical extraction of the moisture within the fabric," Mr Patel told .
Mr Patel said that traditional dryers generally use straight-forward technology: as air gets sucked in from the surrounding area, it travels through a heater or gas burner and into the drum where the clothes tumble around allowing the heat to absorb the moisture with the air leaving the dryer.
However, the ultrasonic dryer uses piezoelectric transducers to remove moisture: when high frequency voltage is applied to the transducers, they vibrate at a high frequency causing trapped water to leave the fabric without heat.
Basically, the dryer shakes the water out of the clothes, speeding up the process and the prototype of the ultrasonic dryer uses five times less energy, thus resulting into potential huge savings.
Mr Patel mentioned that they were talks with a big appliances producers to proceed toward commercialisation.
"We're trying to develop the technology that has efficiency greater than or equal to the state of the art but with a competitive cost, so it can be sold on the US market" because "if you walk into a big box store and you want a dryer, normally the first things consumers look for is how much it costs" and not energy efficiency.
He stated that it will take at least two to five years for the ultrasonic dryers to be available in the market.
