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Wonder washing machine 'virtually waterless'

Apparently, it takes a special washing machine:

http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/xeros-the-one-cup-water-washing-machine-concept/
I really wish guys with new inventions would just come out with a demo and explanation of their device. The Xeros website is very meager. I am very skeptical of this. It seems that one cup of water would just be absorbed by one or two socks, and the clothes would rattle around with the chips. I'll believe it when I see it.
 
Okay, after a bit of conceptualizing: Most of the water in a washer is used for momentum, to force a lesser amount of the water through the cloth. The plastic beads are just about the same specific gravity as water, so will act as a replacement for most of the water. Use the beads instead, re-cycle the beads for each load, save a bunch of water. Same process for the rinse cycle, only now force clear water into the fabric. Again, use more water to rinse than to wash. Make the beads of a material that is softer than cotton, so the beads wear instead of the cloth. Clothes shouldn't be worn any worse that of water is used, since the beads have no more impact then water. Plus, will be lubed with sopy water. Dirtier clothes will need more water and soap, in proportion to amounts of dirt. Plus more to rinse. I don't know about 98%, but I could see 60-70? The only mod to the washer would be a filter system to prevent the beads from clogging the pump. Plus, probably a special dryer to catch the beads that pour out of the pockets while being tumbled.

Lately I've just read that 70% of water is used outside the home (green lawns), then much for flushing toilets. Then showers. I don't see that saving 98% of the minor amount used for laundry will help suburbia. But it will be different when 'we' outlaw green lawns.

Hey, anybody use a flushless urinal? Filled with a liquid polymer that floats on water, the urine sinks through to the sewer. I only used one in a high school, but I could use one at home.
 
casebro said:
Hey, anybody use a flushless urinal? Filled with a liquid polymer that floats on water, the urine sinks through to the sewer. I only used one in a high school, but I could use one at home.
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Please don't buy these. They require a reasonably expensive cartridge that is destroyed by most common cleaning products. That makes them an utter pain in the neck to take care of and an ongoing expense.

Purchase Zurn's 1/8th gallon per flush urinal. It's cheaper, it costs less in the long run per year, and it is a great conservation measure.
 
GreyICE said:
Ahahaha.

No really, the atmospheric pressure is 14 pounds per SQUARE INCH. Assuming your proposed dryer is a perfect sphere with 5 cubic feet of interior space, it needs to be able to resist 21 TONS of atmospheric force pressing on the outside of said sphere.
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It's not quite as bad as that. If I'm reading this phase diagram correctly, water will boil away, at room temperature, at around 0.3 atmospheres. So it's really more like 15 tons of force. And that's really not all that much when it comes down to it, for a well-engineered device--a 40" CRT faces a much more serious problem, since it has to resist a good vacuum with a nearly flat surface--and yet those are common and fairly cheap (relative to scientific equipment and such). A perfect steel sphere could handle 15 tons no problem. You could even get away with pretty thin sheetmetal if you added folded metal supports to prevent buckling, the way car bodies are engineered.

With this device, you could even reclaim some of the energy by running the air through a turbine generator when bringing the chamber back to atmospheric pressure.

Incidentally, vacuum chambers are not always small.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
I don't know. It doesn't sound like it would be very good for the clothing.

Also, if your clothes come out of the washer almost dry, you're going to end up spending a lot of time ironing, which is going to use energy, and some water if you're steam-ironing.

It also doesn't sound very sanitary. You're meant to reuse these plastic chips that have absorbed dirt and germs. One of the reasons we use hot water to wash clothes is to kill and wash away dirt, germs, and dust mites.
 
BenBurch said:
Dr. Trintignant - That reminds me a bit of the anechoic chamber we had at Zenith.

That was SPOOKY inside. Absolutely dead silent.
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Always wanted to go inside one of those. It's amazing how echoey most places are, to the point where just talking sounds "wrong" when you take away the sound reflections. I've been in some fairly non-echoey rooms but not a true anechoic chamber.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
Dr. Trintignant said:
With this device, you could even reclaim some of the energy by running the air through a turbine generator when bringing the chamber back to atmospheric pressure.
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There are thermodynamic costs you're forgetting about with this system.

If you just put wet clothes into a vacuum chamber, sure, they'll evaporate until the pressure is 20 torr or so---water's vapor pressure at room temperature. Then you don't have a vacuum chamber any more, you have a 20-torr chamber, and water doesn't evaporate at room temperature in a 20-torr chamber.

To get more water to evaporate, you have to pump the chamber down. To do that, you stick a piston into the chamber (at 20 torr) and use a motor to pull it towards the outside (at 760 torr)---i.e. you're moving something against a pressure-differential, that's work, and that takes energy. You can't get that energy back.

How much energy does it take? Go back to heat engines; this is a thermodynamic cycle. It is going to work out such that (modulo various places you can recover some of the energy) it takes the same amount of energy as *heating up the clothes* to drive the water off.

Now, it's not true that your dryer just "heats up clothes to drive the water off"---it heats up air to heat up the clothes, lets that heat drive the water off, then expels the heated air along with the water vapor. In principle you should be able to draw your dryer's *inlet air* through a heat exchanger, and try to recover most of the heat. That'd be a big, big gain over a regular dryer. I suspect a vacuum-equipped dryer would be somewhere in between---more efficient than an expel-hot-air dryer, less efficient than a regular dryer with a heat exchanger.
 
ben m said:
There are thermodynamic costs you're forgetting about with this system.
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Well, I only said "some" :-). Those are excellent points, though. I had in fact forgotten that, once the water boils away, it's still trapped in the chamber, so you have to continue pumping that out of the system.

You're right; a heat exchanger dryer could be extremely efficient. In principle, a countercurrent heat exchanger can be very close to 100% efficient, so the only intrinsic losses are those relating to actually separating the water from the fabric (and, I suppose, heating the clothes initially).

ben m said:
I suspect a vacuum-equipped dryer would be somewhere in between---more efficient than an expel-hot-air dryer, less efficient than a regular dryer with a heat exchanger.
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That seems right. Efficient heat exchangers are easier than efficient vacuum pumps, but both are better than just venting the hot air. Of course, the vacuum dryer could have an advantage in being more gentle on clothes.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
Washing machines can do more than clean clothes ... they can sanitize, with bleach. How would this work out using chlorine bleach on whites? Even front loading washers use enough water to evenly dispense the bleach ... but with the little amount this device claims, I'm not so sure.
 
Dr. Trintignant said:
You're right; a heat exchanger dryer could be extremely efficient.
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I'm not sure if I'm missing something here, but condensation dryers has been around for quite some time now, I'm in to at least my second, so that's some 10-15 years. Especially winter time I keep the heat generated indoors, instead of trying to heat up the garden.

Heat Pump driers is the next step in moving from a passive heat exchanger. Í haven't tried one so I have not experience on how well they work.
 
Here_to_learn said:
I'm not sure if I'm missing something here, but condensation dryers has been around for quite some time now, I'm in to at least my second, so that's some 10-15 years. Especially winter time I keep the heat generated indoors, instead of trying to heat up the garden.
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(Googles for it) Hey, neat.

I had heard of the water-cooled ones---which don't save that much energy---but I didn't realize that there were air-cooled ones as well. If I'm thinking straight, they'll behave the same way, thermodynamically speaking, as a once-through heat exchanger, but not as well as a countercurrent exchanger.
 
GreyICE said:
Ahahaha.

No really, the atmospheric pressure is 14 pounds per SQUARE INCH. Assuming your proposed dryer is a perfect sphere with 5 cubic feet of interior space, it needs to be able to resist 21 TONS of atmospheric force pressing on the outside of said sphere.

Vacuum chambers tend to be small for some reason...

This system does seem interesting. Guess it depends on how cheap/easy the chips are to produce.
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I work on autoclaves for bio/pharma use everyday. Some are big enough to drive a car into. They develop a vac. of 30 inHg to dry the load. (It takes a lot of electricity and a big 3 phase vac pump to get that.)

-PbFoot
 
Matty1973 said:
This story has resurfaced, although the claim has been 'watered down' from 2% to under 10% now.

The claim is still that it 'could be released next year' exactly as was claimed this time last year. When do University Professors have to start submitting applications for extending their funding? Smells like another Steorn to me.
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Seriously, this is plain absurd.

So, the conspiracy has now widened from merely Professor Burkinshaw, his department at the University of Leeds, Xeros, and their commercial backers IP Group. Apparently it now includes the prestigious Cambridge Consultants and Xeros's new commercial partner GreenEarth (and perhaps GreenEarth's partner Proctor & Gamble?).

A quick google would have found the University's new press release, Cambridge Consultants' report and GreenEarth's statement. You would have learnt about the partnership with GreenEarth (the reason for the press release), Cambridge Consultants' stunning contribution in solving the essential problem (how to extract your balls from your washing!) and moving the project to the next stage, and the commercial potential for the process in (almost) dry cleaning.

I thought the 'skepticism' shown by the OP and others a year ago was a bit daft - and it's been blown out of the water ;) by events over the year. There is absolutely nothing suspicious about Professor Burkinshaw, his research, the product or the company. And - for reasons too many and too obvious to detail - the thing does not map in any meaningful way to the Steorn saga.

Of course, we should remain cautious about how well the technology will perform in practice. It's far from impossible that some intractable problem will turn up that precludes the process from ever getting into your domestic washing machine (that's the way R&D goes). It certainly isn't looking that way, though. It looks to me that the promise of a year ago is being justified as far as could reasonably be expected.

You know, commercially exploitable research and innovation is one of the things we still do rather well in this country. I'd rather you would celebrate this, instead of displaying an almost pathological 'skepticism' towards UK innovation (sadly, shared by UK funding providers).
 
PbFoot said:
I work on autoclaves for bio/pharma use everyday. Some are big enough to drive a car into. They develop a vac. of 30 inHg to dry the load. (It takes a lot of electricity and a big 3 phase vac pump to get that.)

-PbFoot
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There must be some redefinition of 'tend to' into 'absolute law' that no one told me about, because you're like the third person in this thread to make that mistake.
 
Lucky said:
I thought the 'skepticism' shown by the OP and others a year ago was a bit daft - and it's been blown out of the water ;) by events over the year. There is absolutely nothing suspicious about Professor Burkinshaw, his research, the product or the company. And - for reasons too many and too obvious to detail - the thing does not map in any meaningful way to the Steorn saga.
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The original claim was reducing to 2% of the water usage during 2009, now the claim is 10% by late 2010.
I stand by my skepticism of the original claim. The new claim sounds a lot more reasonable but based on the past claim I maintain some sktepticism.

My analogy to Steorn is that they spend their time researching and raising funds through publicity for fanatasical claims. It is not unknown for research teams (both academic and private sector) to continue looking for funds to extend their comfortable research contracts long after they know the project is going to end up in failure. What made me curious in this case was that it was exactly 12 months after the previous publicity that the new article was released. That may well be a coincidence or it could also be that June is the time of year that further funding from the backers (IP Group) is required.

I should stress I have no personal knowledge of that being the case here - I would be delighted if this end up in success. It would be a truly revolutionary
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product.

Lucky - For transparency may I ask if you have any personal connection to the University?
(My reason for asking being that you are both knowledegable and passionate on the topic but also you come from the same area)
 
Lucky said:
Seriously, this is plain absurd......

There is absolutely nothing suspicious about Professor Burkinshaw, his research, the product or the company.
....
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And we should take your word for that ---- because ?

...... It looks to me that the promise of a year ago is being justified as far as could reasonably be expected.
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No, a reasonable expectation would be this year as promised; not another year ..
 
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