The Study of Fabric Drying Using Direct-Contact Ultrasonic Vibration

Abstract

Our existing cloth drying technology is an energy-intensive process, which generally involves blowing hot air across tumbling wet fabrics to facilitate evaporation and moisture removal. To address the relatively low energy efficiency of existing cloth drying techniques, in this chapter, a totally new cloth drying technology is introduced, which uses high frequency ultrasonic vibrations generated by piezoelectric transducer instead of thermal heating to extract moisture in cloth as a cold mist, dramatically reducing drying time and energy consumption. The physical mechanism of ultrasonic fabric drying process in direct-contact mode is first studied. A novel ultrasonic transducer driving method, in which the power supply to the transducer is regulated by a binary modulating signal, is then developed for use in direct-contact ultrasonic drying of fabrics. A demonstration unit is finally fabricated to show the efficacy of the process and its energy saving compared to thermal drying process.