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Cigar beads are fashioned to control the humidity level in humidors. They not only soak up water when the air is humid, but release it when the air is dry. This idea requires manufacture of beads ~1cm in diameter.
In a continuous cycle, beads pour into the slowly revolving drum (amount based on
the weight of the laundry load to be dried), mix with the wet clothing and exit through perforations in the drum. Each bead is then weighed: dry'ish beads are returned to the drum while beads that have soaked up too much water to be immediately reused are sent to the bead-dryer.
If "Normal Cycle" has been selected, these beads are dried out by blowing air over them. "Fast Dry Cycle" adds a heating element and the beads are immediately reintroduced to the drum when they've dried out. "Economy Cycle" lets them dry at their own pace without the fan. Of course how many loads you can do in a row depends on how many dry beads are available.
The dryer concludes it's cycle when the beads that are leaving the drum are the same weight as when they went in. More perforations in the drum are then opened up to quickly empty the beads. Clothing is dry, static-free, uncreased and there is no need for a lint-trap.
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Humidors? You mean humidifiers? |
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humidors: cigars suffer from too much moisture as well as too little. I was Googling for odd uses of "world's best kitty litter" (small transparent dessicant beads) to see if anybody had come up with the idea of using it to dry clothes, and stumbled upon a forum discussing possibly using it to dehumidfy cigar boxes; the better (standard) solution mentioned was "cigar beads" that can not only dehumidfy, but humidify. |
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Which is perfect for this idea, since then you don't spend too much (or any) energy drying them out between loads unlike the usual dessicants which you have to add a fair bit of energy to get them to release the water. The base energy consumption of the dryer is just that required to slowly tumble the clothing and to cycle the beads. If you're doing another load immediately you use forced-air (ie: a fan) or heated forced-air to ready the beads for reuse, otherwise just let them dry out overnight. |
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/no need for a lint trap/ Your clothes are getting
sanded by wet and dry beads. Of course, there is
going to be lint. |
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I think the biggest problem is the abrasion factor. Wouldn't this
cause rapid wear? |
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I do not get it. There are beads that have some kind of optimal humidity OH - if the environment is more wet than OH, they take up water, and if the environment is more dry than OH, they loose water. Now you add beads with OH="dry clothes" to wet clothes. The beads take up water, are extracted, and dried, then replaced into the clothes, and so on, until the clothes wetness is = dry clothes = OH(note that this will happen asymptotically, so OH will have to be much dryer than dry clothes, otherwise the process will take forever). |
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How is the drying of the beads not using up energy? |
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Well, I don't know how abrasive the beads have to be: depends on whatever the formula is; could be like gel beads, ie: slippery; at worst they're circular anyways and will mostly roll around on the clothes instead of sliding... could be enclosed in a rubber spiderweb which might deal with breakage as well. |
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I'd imagine if ambient humidity is very high then you'd be stuck using the heat option to dry out the beads. |
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