airblade
Latest
Dyson's latest AirBlade dries your freshly washed hands straight from the Tap
While it was never the most original take on powerful commercial hand driers, the Dyson AirBlade has nevertheless been an admirable piece of public restroom kit. Now seven years since its official debut, the company's refreshed the super-charged water dissipator to be 5.5-pounds lighter, dubbing it the AirBlade mk2. Taking things a step further, a new V-shaped model can output the same 420mph blower speed in a package that's roughly sixty-percent smaller. Dyson didn't stop there, though, as its Tap model brings the tech straight to the faucet. The stainless steel enclosure houses the same 1,400-watt DC brushless motor as the previous models, dispersing HEPA-filtered "sheets" of air through a single laser-cut slit in each of two wings that extend from the Tap's sides. The silenced, carbon fiber-enclosed motor is positioned away from the sink whether it's on a wall or a counter, leaving only the streamlined faucet in view. More interesting yet, we're told it reaches 92,000RPM in about 0.7 seconds! Of course, the system is totally automated, with infrared sensors for the water and dryer portions. Sure, over-engineered does come to mind, but we can't say we wouldn't be giddy to get our mitts under one at some point. As it stands, hand-washing connoisseurs can begin placing orders for the Tap come February 5th, and the others in May. For now, you can get your hands dirty (clean?) by clicking past the break for the obligatory detailed press release and video demo.
Dyson speeds up 'world's fastest motor,' gives it some fancy packaging
Sir James Dyson is on a mission to tick as many boxes as possible with the hetero male demographic. He starts out well, bolting the "world's fastest motor" to a gun-shaped instrument of cleanliness. The product pages advertise 10 minutes of "high constant suction," and the top model is named the Animal, but the fact is it's still a vacuum cleaner. The motor is a direct descendant of the one found in the Airblade, with rotational speed jumping from 88K to 104K RPM. Dyson has said he hopes to harness the technology in other devices, including electric cars, giving credence to previously discredited rumors to that effect. Beyond the read link you will find a picture of the tiny speed demon in the loving hands of its inventor. [Via Tech Digest]
Latest sign of the apocalypse: ad-spewing hand dryers
Ah, so now we know why other hand dryer manufacturers have not yet moved over to the high-speed Airblade / JetTowel model: they've been biding their time until we're totally accustomed to those interminable drying sessions, all the while planning to subject us to advertisements while we stand there helplessly with our hands dripping. Well played.[Via The Raw Feed]
Hands-on with Dyson's hurricane of a hand dryer, the Airblade
Although James Dyson may not actually have been the first person to "reinvent" the unhygienic ol' hand dryer, his company's Airblade does seem to be the most powerful option out there for getting the wet stuff off (save for FIU's Wall of Wind), so folks are naturally concerned that its 400mph blast of air will cut through their tender skin like a laser. Well fear not, frequenters of public restrooms, because Popular Science has gone head hand-to-head with one of the new blowers, risking life and limb to make sure that your next trip to the bathroom won't be even more dangerous than usual. Oddly enough, the PopSci guinea pig tester didn't actually use the machine to dry his mitts, but rather chose a few more visually-expressive experiments to evaluate the Airblade's power (and safety). In the linked video, you can check out what happens to a human hand under the effects of the Dyson (spoiler: it dimples the skin, but doesn't leave the bloody welts that some were expecting), along with its ability to blast away tiny Post-It notes and completely pwn a sheet of newspaper. Just remember, we're not responsible for what happens when you get caught by a business owner making a mess of his / her restroom during your attempts at replicating these experiments, so proceed with caution.[Thanks, Drakonen]
The Dyson Airblade: not all that original
After we brought you news of Dyson's "revolutionary" new Airblade hand-drying system yesterday, the comments that followed were pretty equally divided into two camps: about half of you were worried that the high-speed pressurized air would rip the skin and fingernails right off your hands, while the other half pointed out that similar devices have been available overseas for many years. Well sure enough, we just "caught wind" of another such dryer from Mitsubishi -- called the Jet Towel -- and not only does it offer similar guarantees of speedy drying and improved hygiene, it's actually shaped almost exactly like the Dyson model. Now there's nothing wrong with releasing a competing product onto the market -- hey, that's what capitalism is all about -- but we've got to take issue with Dyson's press release that states "The hand dryer: dirty, ineffective and expensive to run...so we reinvented it." Um, no you didn't -- you just took an existing dryer, added an iodine resin filter, and snazzed up the design quite a bit. Oh, and for the commenters concerned that those 400MPH air "blades" will ruin your expensive manicures, you'll be happy to learn that the Jet Towel is a much pokier machine: its blower can barely manage to break 200MPH.
Dyson's Airblade dries hands with 400MPH blast of air
Let's say you're a company that has perfected air flow technology, cornered the high-end vacuum cleaner market, and are now looking for new product categories to conquer. Well you could leverage your copious knowledge to invent the world's most powerful air hockey table, or perhaps an air compressor with a super-snazzy industrial design, but UK-based Dyson has instead opted to tackle a problem that has plagued public restroom patrons for years -- crappy, inefficient hand dryers. Apparently the main problem with traditional hot air dryers is that they rely on evaporation to get the wet stuff off -- a process that can take up to 35 seconds and actually result in dirtier hands as people rub theirs together to speed things up (pushing bacteria deeper into skin layers and fingernails as they do so). Well Dyson is attempting to make this task both quicker and more hygienic with its new Airblade system, a revolutionary dryer that blasts a 400MPH stream of clean, unheated air through a 0.3-millimeter gap and processes the excess water with a disinfecting iodine resin filter. The end result is cleaner hands in a shorter period of time, with waste water being disbursed into the air as a fine mist instead of forming a gross little puddle on the floor. Keep reading for a profile view, and see why the Dyson engineers wisely designed the Airblade so that curious children can't stick their heads in and have their eyes blown into the back of their sockets...[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
