Boyling your clothes dry

[pierhogunn]

That's easy. Their jumpers are coated with a Teflon® based Scotchguard®. Nothing sticks, not even you know what.
.

don't know about that one, I've got a bet with SWMBO that my son's leavings would stick to wet air if given the opportunity.

We count changes in the number of wipes used to remove said leavings from him...

who needs epoxy when you have a baby boy!


something that I didn't think about is that this sort of contraption would be great for cleaning my kilt.

Very little water, no agitation, no heat, no shrinkage, no destruction of the pigments in the fibers...

so add this up for wool items, make it a long tube capable of handling large area rugs, slap it on a 24' trailer and you could have a mobile oriental rug cleaning service, or any bulky item, like bed spreads, or even entire pieces of upholsterered cushions on couches...

one of the reasons that this idea hasn't been pushed forward, as far as I can tell is that there haven't been powerful enough multi-wavelength ultrasonic transducers that don't cost a fortune...
that hotel idea is probably worth it's weight in gold, put it next to the ice machine on every 3rd floor

[gsmittle]

A Little OT…

Dan, you have waaaaaaaaaay too much time on your hands. When I was 13, in the nanoseconds that I wasn't thinking about the mysteries of the fairer sex, I was pondering the age-old Superman vs. Batman question.

If you're on the ISS, after the wash cycle, couldn't you just open a valve and vent the moisture outside? Of course, the valve would have multiple redundancies, meaning 38 valves (that's a PFA number, BTW), an entire computer dedicated to moisture-monitoring, etc.

And yes, boy poo sticks to wet air. I'm a veteran of two sons. Your best bet is encase him in Lucite until he's a teenager. Then you'll have other issues…

g.

[LCHIEN]

OK, I may have been way off base about the wrinkling, I was presuming the wet clothes were just to be dumped into a large bell jar as comes out of the washer. If you have a large enough bell jar-like apparatus, and you can hang the clothes neatly, they MAY come out smooth, though I'm still doubting it because they look all wrinkly when spun dry in the washing machine and I think they will dry in the same shape....

As for energy input...
When you drop the pressure you are engaging a different point on the vapor-solid-liquid phase chart. Dropping from 15PSI atmosphereis pressure to 1-2 PSI or lower will drastically change the "boiling point" from 212F to well below room temperature.
The water will boil off basically on its own if the vacuum is maintained. I believe the temperatrue of the clothes will drop - essentially evaporative cooling at work. to release the heat of evaportation energy to the water which is sucked out of the chamber by the pump and more or less lost if vented to the air. So there's not 950 BTUs of direct heat energy per pound has to be input as someone predicted. The clothes temperature drop will provide the energy.

You do have to keep pumping, you can't simply pull a vacuum immediately and then close it off. The water will evaporate and in the vapor form have pressure which will inhibit the ability to boil off the rest of the water. It would just reach an equilibrium, partly dry but too much humidity to pull off any more water. So you have to continuously pull a vacuum to remove the water pressure to allow the rest of the water to evaporate. The water wil be vented to the room and the humidity in the room increased until the air is saturated then it will condense on cooler surfaces.

[pierhogunn]

well, the idea is to have the vacuum pump continuously pulling as much as possible, only stopping when there is nothing left to pull, which I would believe is when there is nothing left to evaporate out of the clothing... wonder if you could manage that with a hand vacuum pump

hey guys, what about using this to "cool-kiln" dry wood

I know that the space would be limited, but to dry small pieces, how much stress would that put on the grain?

[LCHIEN]

well, the idea is to have the vacuum pump continuously pulling as much as possible, only stopping when there is nothing left to pull, which I would believe is when there is nothing left to evaporate out of the clothing... wonder if you could manage that with a hand vacuum pump

hey guys, what about using this to "cool-kiln" dry wood

I know that the space would be limited, but to dry small pieces, how much stress would that put on the grain?

offhand, I would think vacuum drying wood would dry it much too fast and warp and or split it.

[Tom Slick]

What about freeze drying your cloths like they do food?

There are commercial vacuum kilns used in industry.