And both appliances could soon be revolutionised by lightweight turbo-charged electric motors that spin faster than a Formula 1 car engine.

James Dyson, inventor of the bagless 'dual cyclone' vacuum cleaner, will reveal how the technology works on New Scientist Reports, on the Discovery Channel in the UK at 8pm Tuesday 7 October.

Dyson will explain how a new cheap-but-ultrafast electric motor for home appliances that his engineers have developed needs so much computing power to make it work safely that there is enough spare computer "intelligence" left over to run the new diagnostic aid.

Instead of having to explain who you are, where you bought the machine and what's wrong at some length, owners of conked-out appliances will simply hold their telephone receiver up to the machine. A speaker inside it will then warble like a computer modem--and transmit most of the information the maker needs to know. They can then advise what the owner should do next.

"When something's broken the call centre always wants to know the serial number and model number--and you've never got it to hand so you have to ring back later," Dyson told New Scientist Reports. "But with this technology, you will simply hold down the vacuum's 'on' button and put the telephone receiver next to a speaker, and in our call centre here we'll get the entire history of the machine's motor, what model it is, when it was built, what temperature conditions it has been used in."

Engineers at Dyson's Malmesbury, Wiltshire plant developed the diagnostic aid in a wider project that aims to make heavy, wear-prone electric motors a thing of the past in vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

Conventional AC motors apply current to a central rotor using brushes that wear out after about 600 hours of use--about five years life for a vacuum cleaner.

Although longer-lived "contactless" motor designs exist, none has ever been scaled down affordably and with enough power for use in a consumer appliance like a vacuum cleaner.

So six years ago, Dyson's engineers set out to modify an old contactless motor design--invented in 1838--called a 'switched reluctance' motor. They appear to have succeeded.

Unlike an AC motor, a switched reluctance motor has a series of electric coil windings mounted around an iron rotor attached to a central drive shaft. There is no need for electricity to be applied to the rotor itself.

By sequentially switching the coil currents on and off using control electronics, the magnetic poles on the rotor can be made to continually "chase" the field. The rotor continually seeks the point of least magnetic resistance--reluctance--between two opposing coils. And the lack of contacting elements means the motor can turn much faster than an AC motor.

Dyson's engineers have now built such a prototype for a vacuum cleaner. Called the X020, it's able to run at an ultrafast 100 000 revolutions per minute, up to four times faster than the AC motors commonly used in today's vacuums cleaners--delivering about 33 percent more "suck".

This is a novel speed for any consumer product, says Norman Fulton, a technology specialist with Switched Reluctance Drives, a leading industrial motor company based in Harrogate, Yorkshire "It's a speed more common in high speed industrial generators and turbo chargers in vehicles," he says. Dyson's challenge, he says, will be to ensure that the motor has a strong containment because of the safety implications of working at 100 000 rpm.. And controlling noise will also be an issue.

The motor's very high speed and design means that a small 8-bit microcomputer chip is needed to control it. And it was to exploit the spare memory in that microcomputer that the engineers developed the idea of storing useful information that can be phoned to a repair centre.

New Scientist Reports is a weekly science and technology programme, produced by New Scientist magazine, and broadcast on the Discovery Channel in the UK at 8pm and 10.35 pm on Tuesdays.

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