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AEG spent eight years developing a new dishwasher arm. Why? Because the old arms just don't cut it anymore. When engineer Fredrik Dellby took a look at his loaded dishwasher, he realized that while the appliance is essentially the same as what we used in the 1970s, the contents had changed completely, from the cookware and tableware inside to the food-scraps stuck to the plates.
The best way to get efficient cleaning is to make the dishwasher cylindrical so that the spray-arm can reach every part of the box. That wouldn't work who has a cylinder-shaped hole in their kitchen? Dellby's answer was to reinvent the arm, which turned out to be a lot harder than it would seem.
The Proclean arm is pretty much just a regular arm with another arm on the end. This second bar spins and sprays its jets of water in eccentric patterns. This attacks the dirt from various angles, blasting it off. The almost random movements are inspired by the movements of the human arm when scrubbing pots: we work in circles, but they're far from identical or even. The secondary arm also reaches a lot further into the corners of the box, like the single, eccentric windshield-wiper you see on a Mercedes.
What took so long? Perfecting the arm. A dishwasher arm is powered by the water that it spits out, and this, along with the precise nozzle designs, makes it hard to predict the behavior of even a single, fixed arm. Dellby's team had to not only redesign the arm, but also the design and testing process itself. That took a while.
The story of the process (sadly rather light on technical details) in on show at AEG's new State of the Arm online exhibit, which also showcases the designs of other arms, from the tonearm on a turntable to our own arms, which have shrunk as evolution stopped our knuckles from dragging on the floor. Check it out while you're waiting for AEG to put the arm into its dishwashers. Hopefully it won't take another eight years.
The Proclean Arm Story [AEG]
The State of the Arm [AEG]
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