Archify Live: Dyson Pioneering Technology

Archify Live is our web series that responds to an increasing demand for virtual learning and networking. Our third session was held on the 10th of June 2021 and was presented by Dyson. Below is a transcript of the presentation.

Presenter

Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Archify Live. I would like to introduce our presenter today. Luke Bentley is from Dyson and he'll be taking us through the presentation brought to you by Dyson called “Pioneering Technology.” Luke, welcome.

Luke Bentley 

Thank you, Sophie. Thanks guys for jumping on to today. It's fantastic to know that you want to hear more about Dyson's pioneering technology. So what I want to do today, just to introduce myself to you. So Luke Bentley, National Sales and Specification Manager for Dyson. I wanted to take you through a bit about the Dyson business, maybe some things you might not be aware of, within Dyson, and what we're involved in and take you through a bit of a journey into our core technologies, some of the technologies that we're investing in, and some of the areas that we can help you out with, with your designs, particularly around washroom designs with our Airblade hand drying product.

So just to jump straight in, I wanted to take you through to where it all began. James Dyson, our founder and very much part of our business is basically an engineer at heart and the easiest way to sum up Dyson and probably Dyson as a business and in one word would be would be ‘Perseverance’. So you can see there on screen, the first vacuum cleaner that James took to market. It took a little over 5000 prototypes to get that first vacuum cleaner to market. So he very much loves to be involved in the technology and perseveres to get it absolutely right before we bring our technology right through to market.

We've been on a considerable journey since the launch of the first vacuum cleaner back in 1993. And it's certainly come a long way since then, as you can see on screen. James is all about solving problems that others choose to ignore. And that's still very much a part of our business, in today's sense. So he saw a problem with existing vacuum cleaners, bagged vacuum cleaners, loss of suction, that type of thing, and persevered to bring out the first, no loss suction bagless vacuum cleaner. It's definitely come a long way to the to the stick vacuum cleaners that hopefully you've seen and potentially using in your in your own homes today.

Dyson, today, we consider ourselves a technology company. So very much a research, scientific based business. So really getting into the technology and investing heavily within that. I mentioned before, it is still a family business with James very much at the heart and soul of the business. We've got about 14,000 employees globally, and a large part of that are our engineers and scientists. And as I'll take you through the journey, you'll get to understand why we need so many engineers and scientists with some of the technologies that we're starting to invest in.

The product journeys been an interesting one, on the left hand side there with our vacuum cleaners, we started to get into purifying technology with air purifiers. Our hand drying range with our Airblade machines, which I'll focus on in a large part today. Our lighting, which people aren't so familiar with, so investing and manufacturing a lighting range, and our beauty products without our hair dryers and straighteners, and that's one probably area just to call out that we weren't in a beauty products before in the past. And we knew that technology quite well, you know, investing heavily in motor technology and airflow and aerodynamics and understanding that, but we didn't necessarily know the science of hair. So knowing and understanding and getting into to that with our own science based labs scattered around the globe, we were able to understand that over certain temperatures hair starts to damage and so we came out with the supersonic that that helps to not damage hair through the hair drying process. So you know, a product category that was completely new to our business.

We're starting to get into some different technologies as well. As you know, it's come a long way since the humble vacuum cleaner, and starting to invest heavily in batteries and acoustics, that you will obviously see from an Airblade perspective with our hand dryers and some of our air purification technologies. And we’re really getting into software and machine learning and it's taking us into some weird and wonderful areas. So who knows what sort of product categories we're going to get into next.

An area that you might not be familiar with is Dyson farming. So we're starting to take the technology into the farming sector and starting to disrupt some of the technologies that are in that space. James has invested about 74 million pounds into this area at the moment. So an area that we're looking to get into to disrupt and make use of the technology to hopefully better certain industries.

We've also got the Dyson Institute. We've got our own university on campus over in our headquarters in Malmesbury and this is where we take graduates into a basically university course. It's fully funded by Dyson. And they work on real life technology projects within the business throughout that period. So they stay on site and on campus. So we're really investing into that future engineering type personnel

In terms of the investment. So all of this is bringing together a story of technology and investment into those areas. We've committed a little under $5 billion (AUD) in investment over the next five years into this technologies and into our investment programs with our Dyson Institute.

So really the categories that we're going to see evolving, you know, is some of those on screen at the moment, but there could be new categories for us as well. So exciting times and in some weird and wonderful ways that we're jumping into.

What I wanted to focus on mostly today was our Airblade range. And this is our Airblade hand drying technology. So hopefully, you guys are familiar with some of the designs you see on screen at the moment. Just to take you through from bottom right, our blade dB, that was the first hand drying product to come into the market for us. So that was back in 2006. So it's gone through a bit of a journey into our Airblade V, which is the bottom left, a versatile, robust type product. Hopefully, you guys have used and specied these in the past, versatile in the sense that it can be put in high rise commercial buildings, for a sleek type feel, but also in terms like council, amenities and washrooms where it may be more prone to damage. There's a polycarb blend in terms of out of facia. So it's quite robust in that sense. The top two, I'll go into a bit more detail on that. So that’s our Airblade 9kJ which you may not have seen. It’s the latest hand drying product to our range, and our Airblade wash+dry. But before I jump into that, so those two products, I wanted to just take you through some of the core technologies into the Airblade range, and what makes us different to other hand drying methods that are out there today.

So we don't use any heating elements in our products. So what that means is we're actually not heating to dry the hands, we're using high speed sheets of air in a squeegee like effect, to squeegee the water off our hands to dry. So what this means is that they’re really, really efficient to run. This is where we're seeing a lot of operational managers looking after facilities really love the way that they're reducing costs from an ongoing perspective. And we actually use, what is called a digital motor, rather than traditional brushless motors, which I'll touch on now.

So we've been developing motor technology for quite some time at 25 years, and we've honed and perfected and looked to get better at the digital motor. As you can probably understand, it's across a number of our products that we have not just our Airblade hand drying range. So a digital motor in the fact that it's brushless. So what that means is that it doesn't burn out over time, it actually spins about three times faster than a traditional motor.

The size, as you can see on screen, is another factor where we're able to design the machines in a smaller compact sense. And a really, really high powered, efficient motor. This is where we can really draw air into the unit and get high speed sheets of air, like I mentioned before, in a squeegee like effect to squeegee the water off the hands. The air output out of the machine is around 600 kilometer hour sheets of air, which is sort of the equivalent to an aeroplane speed.

Traditional washroom setups can look something like this with paper towel. So we were seeing a big shift from an environmental and a sustainability approach prior to COVID it's still very much around at the moment but the you know, the shift is and what's topical at the moment is this hygiene piece but very much environmental and sustainable products are out there at the moment and we were seeing a lot of businesses inquire with us to look at transitioning away from paper towel. Yes, one was a cost point of view but the other was the environmental piece and getting rid of paper and waste out of their facilities.

Now I'll take you through the life cycle for paper towels. The deforestation, the transportation, a lot of water and chemicals in the process. But the big thing is the waste component and some of the sites that can even be remote where waste is harder to get out of facilities, you know transitioning to hand drying technology in air blades was very much on people's minds, and still is to this day.

We do a lot of research at Dyson. We've actually got our own microbiologist and labs scattered around the globe. And now more than ever, obviously, in this COVID environment where hand washing is pivotal and critical in terms of the washrooms. So we've done some research and we found that damp hands can transmit up to about 1000 times more bacteria than dry hands. So it's obviously important to get people to wash their hands but equally as important to get people to dry their hands.

And our Airblade range of hand dryers, all come standard with HEPA filters. So what this means is we're actually capturing a lot of the dirty air within that washroom environment. So the air that's actually coming out of the machines is nice, clean air, actually stripping out about 99.95% of bacteria and particles out of the air. So we're drying hands with nice clean air.

We've got a number of microbiologists and labs around the globe where we've been able to understand hygiene, and it's more prevalent in today's world with COVID. So we've published a number of articles out there in terms of best practice in terms of hand drying methods that we're more than happy to share.

Now, all the technology I mentioned previously, with digital motors and HEPA filters, it’s all around the dry times. So you can see across a number of the products there, we've got anywhere between a 10 second and a 14 second dry time with the Airblade range. So that's encompassing the high power digital motors and airflow that we're able to get through the machine and making sure that we're drying hands with nice clean air.

Now what I wanted to take you through now is our Airblade wash and dry product. So perfect for designs in our post COVID world, in terms of touch free amenity. So we're seeing a lot of design shift to touch free, especially in that washroom area.

Our Airblade wash and dry product is wash and dry all in the one place. So at the sink or basin, being able to wash and dry our hands and not dripping water over the floor to get to paper towels and keeping everything contained in that one location.

I know that with washrooms, you can be tight for space with some of the designs, so what we’ve been able to do, by utilising the Airblade washer and dryer, is to keep everything in one location, and then create some more space outside and on the other side of the wall. Now where this is particularly of interest is commercial buildings or anywhere that there might be lettable real estate space on the outside of that wall, further revenue stream to building owners etc.

We carry a six Star WELS rating, so from water efficiency with the product 1.9 liters per minute. So really, really efficient in terms of water flow which is particularly important when putting in high traffic areas where you put in a number of these tap and hand dryers in the design.

We've got two different variants. We've got a basin mount and a wall mount. And I'll show you some photos in a second and some real world examples but you can see from the tech specs here from the makeup of the product.

We've got a really good pre installation guide for you guys, when you're designing. What we want to make sure is the compatibility for wash planes and basins, making sure that we've got a nice compatible basin giving the best experience we can to anyone washing and drying their hands. We hold a huge amount of importance, at Dyson, at investing into making sure that compatibility works. And we’ve got a really good guide so you can understand some of the dimensions to work with that we're more than happy to share.

I hope you guys are familiar with Corian. So Corian produce a number of wash plane products. We've got a partnership with Corian where the pairing works really well. We put a number of these into high traffic areas, shopping centers, airports, with high traffic and high volume footfall coming through. The pairing works really well.

A couple of real life installation photos here. The one on the left is the brickworks shopping center in burwood Victoria. So that's actually just being named the world's most sustainable shopping center. So a really unique design there with a cylindrical set up. On the right we've got a Stocklands Shopping Center in Queensland.

But we don't just work in with the wash planes, we can also work with just stand alone basins whether they be inset or above counter. And there's a couple of install shots here. So we’ve got a Westfield in Queensland, which went with a Rogerseller basin. And we've got the University of Western Australia with a Coroma Liano design.

I wanted to now take you through the Airblade 9kJ. So this is the latest product to our range. So it is our most efficient HEPA-filtered hand dryer.

The design brief around this one was efficiency; trying to get a really efficient product to market. So you can see there on the screen, its usual utilises 9.1 kilojoules of energy per dry. And to put things into perspective, that's about running your kettle 30 times in terms of energy usage, so a really efficient product to run, with a cost of just around about $19 a year to run in Eco mode. And on that, just in terms of the Eco mode, it has dual power options. So we've got eco at 650 watt and maximum at 900 watt with a two second dry time difference between the two. So depending on the area and washroom that you put these in, if it's a high traffic area, you'd probably go with the max mode where you want to get people in and out quickly. And the Eco mode in a less high traffic environment.

It still utilises the digital motor, which is across all of our Airblade range. So the high powered digital motor spins at about 75,000 revs per minute drawing air into the unit, and in this case, is towards the top. So what it's doing is drawing into the unit, passes through the HEPA-filter. So stripping out all that bacteria and particle matter, and straight in line through and down the machine. So the reason why it looks the way it does, with that straight line configuration, is so we don't get any turbulence. Turbulence in hand dryers isn't a great thing, because what turbulence means is noise and no one likes a noisy hand dryer. So we've got a very quiet machine that produces about 600 kilometer sheets of air to squeegee and dry the hands.

Since 2006, we've been involved in hand dryers and we've learned a number of things along the way. So a big part of this product was understanding how people dry their hands. And it's amazing the length that the scientists and engineering departments went in terms of understanding how people dry their hands. We've got a curve like aperture where the air comes out, where we're able to get a really good, dry time; 10 seconds for eco and 12 seconds for maximum mode. So a lot of work was done in terms of the engineering and design process around how people dry their hands, we did a lot of hand modeling in the process.

So just to recap that. (the 9kJ) With the digital motor coupled with a HEPA-filter, and that curved blade, straight line configuration, we're able to produce the fastest, most energy efficient HEPA-filter hand dryer that's out there today.

I will now take you through some of the running costs. And this is where from an operational point of view, we really excel. So you can see on the left there, the paper rowel dispenser is just under $1,500 a year to run. Whereas as low as $19 a year for our Airblade 9kJ. So from an operational point of view, and that ongoing cost, it’s really, really efficient to run.

Now what's equally important, is obviously the carbon footprint and you can see again, against paper towels and some of the energy hungry hand dryers that are that are out there, we’re as little as 2.5 grams per dry, so the environmental footprint is really positive for the Airblade range.

We're more than happy to put forward and work through any cost analysis and usage analysis, if you're working with clients, just to understand or paint a better picture with the washroom areas. We do a lot of this at the moment. So understanding how Airblade can help with washroom designs and from an operational point of view and experience point of view, but also the dollars and cents which can be quite important. So we do a lot of that and more than happy to help work through some of these cost saving calculations with you.

What it also produces is the carbon emission savings. With these examples on screen; this was a real life example, where we had about 32 Airblade machines up against paper towels. And we were saving about 10 million grams in terms of estimated carbon savings per year.

Some pictures of the 9kJ. There's McDonald's and a commercial office building here. The stainless steel body with sleek line effect looks quite good in a commercial office. We've put them in a number of different areas out there, manufacturing facilities, childcare centers, so a versatile product in that sense, purely off the back of some of the efficiency that it brings to the washrooms.

Across our Airblade range, we carry a number of certifications. So I just wanted to highlight a few of these, here. These don't apply to absolutely every Airblade product however. The HACCP certification, so food grade areas and that type of thing with a number of the products. Quiet Mark, so really quiet and efficient machines, which is always important. No one likes a noisy hand dryer. So accredited in a number of different areas.

In terms of the warranty, and service. So across our Airblade range, we carry a five year parts warranty. And when you're using the Airblade wash and dry, it's actually five year parts and labor. So what that means is that if there's any issues with the machine, all the warranty’s are handled directly with Dyson, and in the use of the Airblade 9kJ, as a as an example, if there was an issue with the machine, you don't need any licensed electricians to come back and change over the machine. It's all plug and play. So the front facia will be removed. And just basically plugs and screws straight back in. So no licensed electricians in terms of that change over for service. But on the Airblade wash and dry, we cover the labor component as well.

What I wanted to leave you with today was some of the studies that we've done. And this one's particularly of interest in today's world. And this is a study across Australia and New Zealand. We wanted to understand people's thoughts and feelings when coming back into the office environment. It gave some really good insights into what people were feeling, you know, hygiene concerns and those type of things. What I've mentioned throughout today's presentation around air quality and hygiene, touching services and what people are looking for, it's great to see some of the stats here and we're hoping that we can help support movements back into the office but as equally making people comfortable when they're in that environment.

And one product just to leave you with. A product we've only launched recently, which is our Dyson Heapa Cool Formaldehyde. So it’s an air purifying product. It basically strips pollutants and bacteria out of the air while purifying the air and the spaces around us.

My team and I are more than happy to help work through any designs that you may have and any questions that you may have in regards to the presentation, the technology or the business. You can see the numbers and details on screen.

Q&A

Q: How much space does the Airblade W and D unit require in wall or cabinet?

A: The wall mount design needs about 200mm behind the scenes. That's to cater for the piping in the casing that we have back of wall.