Dyson: Putting Air in Action

Perhaps the only inventors who have spent more time considering the behavior of air more than James Dyson, founder of the company that bears his name, are the Wright Brothers. Dyson is undoubtedly best known for his vacuums. To develop the Dual Cyclone technology, he spent five years and created 5,127 prototypes. Beyond being an inventor himself, Dyson is also a proponent of product development, sponsoring the annual James Dyson Award (jamesdysonaward.com) and the James Dyson Foundation (jamesdysonfoundation.com). Speaking at the 2010 Rolls-Royce Science Prize, Dyson stated: “Our only alternative to survive and prosper is to develop more new technology, to file more patents and to engineer better products than our global competitors.”

Among the recent developments to come out of Dyson, the company, are the Airblade hand dryer and the Air Multiplier.

The Air Multiplier—arguably the reinvention of the fan—uses a brushless motor that draws in up to 5.28 gallons of air per second. The air is accelerated by an annular aperture, then driven over a 16° airfoil-shaped ramp that channels the direction of the driven air. Meanwhile, air behind the circular structure is drawn into the airflow via “inducement,” while air around it is drawn via “entrapment.” The air is amplified 15 times.

The Airblade—arguably the reinvention of the rather ineffective warm air hand dryers found in public restrooms—uses a digital motor with a spindle that spins at 88,000 rpm, drawing in 9.774 gallons of air per second. The air is forced through an aperture that is just 0.3-mm wide. The result of all this are sheets of wind coming out at up to 400 mph, which has the effect of scraping the water from wet hands. Germophobes might be interested to learn that a recent study conducted by the University of Bradford (U.K.) and published in the Journal of Microbiology found that “The Airblade™ was superior to the warm air dryers for reducing bacterial transfer.”