Abstract
Residential clothes drying consume about 650 TBtu of primary energy per year in the United States, equivalent to 3% of primary residential energy consumption. There is a strong impetus to reduce the energy consumption of clothes dryers by both improving existing technology and developing alternatives that use fundamentally different drying mechanisms. Clothes drying technologies are broadly classified into either evaporative or mechanical drying. The focus of this paper is on mechanical drying, including vibrational, centrifugal, and press-based methods. In this work, the physical processes involved in these mechanical fabric drying processes were analyzed to develop general theories of mechanical cloth drying energy efficiency. Quantitative evaluation of the theories requires measured fabric properties. To accomplish this, a set of experiments was conducted on samples of a standard test fabric. The fabric was a cotton-polyester blend specified by the US Department of Energy to evaluate the standardized efficiency of all residential clothes dryers in the US. Mercury porosimetry experiments were conducted to determine the fabric pore size distribution, apparent density, and porosity. Elasticity experiments were conducted to determine the fabric’s Young’s modulus. Isostatic press experiments were conducted to establish a relationship between compression force and fabric moisture content. The data resulting from these experiments were combined with mathematical models developed in this work to calculate the theoretical maximum performance limits for mechanical drying of the standard fabric. The results of the analysis are used to make recommendations for the most promising technologies that offer the greatest potential energy savings for residential clothes drying.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3160-3176 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Drying Technology |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 15 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Funding
This work was sponsored by the US Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC. The authors would like to acknowledge Erika Gupta, Emerging Technologies Program Manager (Acting), US Department of Energy Building Technologies Office. The authors would also like to thank Matthew Weathers for operation of the unheated tumble dryer test. Notice: This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-ACO5-000R22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ).
Keywords
- Fabric physical properties
- energy efficiency
- fabric drying
- mechanical drying
- ultrasonic
