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A designer named Elie Ahovi has come up with a concept washing machine that levitates your clothes and uses dry ice to wash them without using water.
It's called the "Orbit", and was put together for the Electrolux Design Lab. It consists of a superconductive ball cooled with liquid nitrogen, which you fill with your clothes, and a battery-filled ring generating a magnetic field, which the ball levitates inside as its electrical resistivity drops.
Inside the drum, dry ice is fired at high pressure into the clothes, sublimating on impact to produce minimal damage to the fabric. Once dirt is separated, it's filtered out and the CO2 is sucked back up and turned back into a solid. The whole process takes just a few minutes, is essentially silent, and leaves you with clean, dry clothes.
The downside, of course, is the huge amounts of power it would suck up, and the fact that you'd still have to remove the dirt every so often.
Still, if those difficulties can be addressed, then in a few years we might be able to -- as Ahovi puts it -- "live the experience of a new type of cleaning".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
