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Dyson recently released the DC59 Digital Slim, a gadget that the company is touting as its most powerful cordless vacuum to date—so powerful that it can match a stand-up model. Aside from a few minor changes, this current generation of the Digital Slim looks very similar to the DC 44, released in 2012 and the DC 35, Dyson’s first cordless vacuum from 2011.
Place all three side-by-side and you’ll see little superficial difference, which is a testament to a design language that's helped Dyson give mundane devices some sex appeal. But aesthetics aside, the real story about Dyson is hidden underneath the plastic and metal you see hanging in your broom closet.
>DC motors generally spin at 25,000 rpm. The Dyson can reach up to 120,000 rpm.
“The least sexy bit of the vacuum is the most important bit,” James Dyson, the company’s founder, tells me during a product demo. “Though,” he adds, “motors are quite sexy when you get into them.” Dyson is holding a motor in his hand, roughly the size of a thick hockey puck. Next to him sits another for comparison, about double the size and at least triple the weight. The smaller motor, referred to as the V6, is found in the DC59 Digital Slim and the DC58, Dyson’s recently released handheld vacuum.
This motor, explains Dyson, is the company’s newest technological feat; a round chunk of electronics and plastic that spins so fast the knighted designer believes it will eventually make cords obsolete. “You could go on with that old thing,” he says, nodding to the hulking brushed motor that’s found in many corded vacuum cleaners, “but why would you want to?”
The story of the DC 59 technically begins 15 years ago, when Dyson first began developing its digital motors. Every year since then, the company’s engineers have incrementally improved the technology. The last iteration of the motor, V4, can be found in the Dyson AirBlade Tap, a faucet with a built-in hand dryer that can dry wet hands in 14 seconds. And just last year, the company opened an $80 million manufacturing facility in West Park, Singapore, so Dyson could produce the motors privately and en mass. The 45,000-square-foot facility is outfitted with 50 robots that cranked out around 6 million motors in 2013.
Dyson annually pours around $210 million into R&D, and the factory is a good example of how much of a bet the company is willing to make on motor technology. It all comes back to a simple fact: To have a high-performance machine, you need a high-performance motor. Most cordless machines use brushed DC motors, which generally spin at around 25,000 rpm. The Dyson model uses a digital pulse, coursing through electromagnets, to propel a magnetic rotor, which can reach up to 120,000 rpm. To put that in perspective: An engine in a Formula One car moves at 19,000 rpm, a jet engine gets about 17,000 rpm. The Dyson motor is so fast, they actually had to develop new software to measure its speed.
The benefits of an ultra-fast motor are fairly obvious: The faster the motor spins, the more power the machine has. In the case of the DC 59, Dyson claims the V6 powers the two tiers of the company’s signature cyclones to give the gadget three times the suck of other battery-powered vacuums on the market. Combine that with its carbon fiber bristles that pick up fine dust, and you’ve got yourself a highly efficient vacuum.
The last Digital Slim got about 20 minutes of cleaning time, but more efficient use of battery life knocked the DC59 up to 26 minutes of consecutive use, which makes it a viable alternative to a corded machine. That's not a long time, but Dyson claims that after researching how long people actually clean for, they found that people didn’t use a vacuum for more than 20 minutes in one session. “People get obsessed by length of cleaning as though they want to clean for longer,” says Dyson. “Although everyone wants a longer run time, they don’t actually need it.”
Meanwhile, the 1,536 engineers and scientists employed at Dyson are constantly looking for what’s next. Currently, the company is partnering with Andre Geim at the University of Manchester to research and develop applications for graphene, a carbon-based super material that has the potential to overhaul manufacturing because of its lightness, strength and electrical conductivity.
Rob Green, a senior design engineer who worked on the DC59 compares Dyson’s current research into graphene to its work with carbon fiber, which is now used in the V6 as a bearing carrier. “It’s kind of a knock-on effect,” he says. “Without the carbon fiber, we couldn’t be spinning the motor as fast as we are, which means we couldn’t move the air as quickly as we are, which means we wouldn’t have the same efficiency, which means we wouldn’t have this product.”
>“There are other applications,” says Green. “Convection ovens that blow air through, hair dryers, central air systems..."
It’s getting ahead of the curve that’s spurs innovation, says Green. Which is why Dyson sometimes develops technologies without a specific application in mind. The AirBlade is one example of that lateral thinking. The horizontal swiping, which moves air efficiently across the surface, not unlike a windshield wiper wasn’t originally meant for the now ubiquitous hand dryer. Ask Dyson what it was meant for and he says, “I want to keep that secret because we haven’t given up on that yet.”
It makes you wonder then, what kind of applications graphene and high-powered motors could bring about. After all, Dyson is really trying to answer one big question: How do you most efficiently move air? “We have a very specific application for these motors, but there are other applications,” says Green. “Convection ovens that blow air through, hair dryers, central air systems...” At which point, I stop him and ask the obvious: Will Dyson be getting into the hair dryer game anytime soon? After a brief pause, Green responds with an answer the notoriously-secretive Sir Dyson himself would approve of: “We really can't talk about future projects.”
