How Dyson Made Its Airblade Hand Dryers 50% Quieter

How Dyson Made Its Airblade Hand Dryers 50% Quieter

They’re the greatest thing to happen to public restrooms since those automatic toilet seat covering contraptions, but now Dyson’s engineers have managed to find a way to make its Airblade hand dryers even better by reducing their noise by 50 per cent. Because as impressive as drying your hands in just 12 seconds is, the previous versions came with a healthy dose of volume.

Besides a new digital motor featuring a custom silencer designed to eliminate annoying motor noises, the new Airblade dB also deals with the dryer’s deafening air jets, which reach speeds of up to 675km/h. In the previous model, the jets of air from the front and back of the dryer met near its opening to scrape water off your hands like a car’s wiper blades. But this approach meant the jets collided at very high speeds producing lots of noise.

In the new Airblade dB, the dryer’s vents have been redesigned with scallop-shaped openings that angle the jets down more, giving them time to slow down before they collide. And this reduced speed, along with the dryer’s other hardware improvements, result in their sound being reduced by an impressive 50 per cent. Now if only Dyson engineers could reduce all sounds in a public washroom, they wouldn’t quite be so awful.

[Dyson]


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