Brave New Home: Designers See Self-Stocking Fridges and Clothes-Folding Washers in Our Future

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome1.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The smart faucet in GE's Home 2025 not only dispenses filtered water, but also ice and carbonated water, vitamins and various beverages. Just place your finger on the faucet and the built-in hydration sensor lets you instantly see your hydration level. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome2.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Save space and time in GE's Home 2025. A cutting board doubles as the dishwasher lid, and sliding mesh dividers in the prep area keep produce cooled and easily accessible.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome3.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]With the in-sink dishwasher in GE's Home 2025, wash small loads in just 5 minutes. Integrated sensors in the sink alert you when chemicals or bacteria are present in your produce, so you can keep washing your produce until the readout says the contaminants are gone. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome4.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Sustainability will be integral to living in the future, driven by urbanization, frugality and climate change. Household appliances must use minimal water, or be able use recycled water. Advances in filtration and sanitization technology will help keep laundry and dishwasher appliances from getting too thirsty. Gray water from the dishwasher in GE's Home 2025 is recycled back through and can be used for the sustainable growing wall, where herbs and vegetables are harvested.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome5.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]  In GE's Home 2025, it's easy to turn your food disposal into compost mode and create compost pellets. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome6.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Packed in a 27-inch-wide design, the oven in GE's Home 2025 exhibit combines the efficiency of an induction cooktop, Advantium® Speedcook oven, sensor cooking, and a traditional thermal oven into a single unit. The interchangeable and integrated induction accessories allow for unlimited and exciting culinary exploration, as well as more cabinet space when stored in the integrated storage drawer below. No longer confined to predetermined burner locations, pots and pans can be placed anywhere you see fit. Cooking is now more collaborative and connected when using your smart phone to monitor the status from the comfort of your sofa.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome7.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Imagine virtual experts who can help you learn to cook from the convenience of your own home or prepare great meals with friends around the country virtually. In GE's home of the future, improvements to voice recognition, motion plus facial recognition and deep-thinking technology will create "human" simulations of experts in fields like cooking. Sensors in kitchen appliances, as well as virtual cooking tutors will give instructions tailored to your skill level and interests, so meals come out perfect every time. Friends and family can even share a celebrity chef experience with a replica of a famous maestro giving instructions to make it more of a party than lesson. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome8.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]  In GE's Home 2025, this innovative laundry machine not only washes and dries, it stores clothing items in convenient pellet form, and then revives clothes for immediate wear or dispenses them in compressed form for travel. Commercial, public compressors and revivers are found in many common areas around the city.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome9.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The laundry machine in GE's Home 2025 displays a virtual closet for you to choose items from, even suggesting matching outfits or clothing based on weather. You can even plan your entire wardrobe for the week. [/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome10.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]No need to remember what medications to take when living in GE's Home 2025. Just place your hand on the mirror, and the Medical Dispenser reads your vital signs and decides the amount of medication needed for the day. The machine combines, processes and dispenses the medication in liquid form. Medication cartridges can be easily reloaded.[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/BraveNewHome111.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]No need to drive to a store and grocery shop with GE's Home 2025. Shop anywhere by searching on your smart device. Then have your groceries delivered directly to your front door, even while you're away. A device installed outside of your home keeps delivered items cool or warm until you return. Containers conveniently plug into the refrigerator, and empty containers are collected for reuse. [/image]
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When the Czech-born industrial design maven Arthur N. BecVar ran appliance design at GE in the in the 1950s, he warned his team that consumers were too smart to settle for fancy styles and urged them to focus on “materials usage, energy conservation … and human factors.” His vision got firm outlines in 1960, when BecVar asked his team to design and build the kitchen of the future. They’ve got a lot it right. They nailed the induction cooktop, the refrigerator ice dispenser and the freezer. Even their ultrasonic dishwashers are about to enter the kitchen.


BecVar’s kitchen of the future from 1960 got many things right. His automatic plastic dishmaker even anticipated 3D printing.

Now BecVar’s successor, Lou Lenzi, and his team are looking to the year 2025, when the always-connected world but also ecological and health issues like water scarcity and aging population come calling. “This isn’t about the Jetsons or pie in the sky,” says Lenzi. “It’s about reality-based innovation that will be possible over the next decade.”

Lenzi says that the project, called Home 2025, explores the intersection of society, culture and technology, and everyday life. “We conceptualized how we will prepare meals, wash clothes, and interact with information as families over the next dozen years.”

Lenzi says that some of the key themes that emerged include the death of the single-purpose appliance, automated food delivery, and biometric machines that can dispense medication and give more independence to older consumers. This means, for example, that laundry machines will wash, dry and store clothes in “convenient pellets,” then “revive” them for immediate wear, and dispense them in “compressed form” for travel.

Can somebody press fast forward, please?

Brine Science: How Salt and Ingenuity Purify Water for Thousands in Asia and Africa

Early last summer, Sister Mary Ethel Parrot dropped by the office of WaterStep, a Louisville charity fighting waterborne disease around the world, and picked up a pair of tote bags filled with tubing, clamps and other plastic parts. The nun took them on a plane to Uganda, where she had set up a boarding school for girls.

In Africa, Sister Mary Ethel, who is also a trained physicist, helped assemble the kits into a pair of ingenious mini water-treatment systems that look like a cross between a tea kettle and a bicycle pump. The devices use ordinary salt and electricity from a car battery to produce chlorine gas that kills germs in water for 600 African students and nuns at the Sisters of Notre Dame School and convent in rural Uganda. “In Uganda they can get their hands on salt, but not much more,” says Steve Froelicher, an engineer at GE Appliances in Louisville who helped design the system. “With salt, a car battery and some solar panels you could be making clean water for years.”

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A Teaching Moment: Students at the Sisters of Notre Dame School in Uganda listen to Sister Mary Ethel Parrot explain electrolysis.
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Carpe Sodium: The school collects rain water in large barrels and purifies it with ingenious chlorine generators using salt and car battery.
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Froelicher and his colleague Sam DuPlessis led a group of GE volunteers who together with WaterStep designed the device last year. The system runs electric current between two electrodes through a water solution of sodium chloride, a.k.a. table salt. The electrolysis breaks up the salt molecules and frees bubbles of chlorine gas from the brine.

Since its launch at Louisville’s IdeaFestival last September, WaterStep shipped 165 units to Pakistan, India, Kenya and elsewhere. DuPlessis says that the devices are already purifying water for over 127,000 people. They include neighbors of Wesley Korir, winner of the 2012 Boston Marathon, who brought the device to his hometown Kitali, Kenya.

But the Louisville the team is far from finished. DuPlessis and Froelicher are working to reduce the system’s power demand below 30 watts and use solar panels instead of a car battery as the source of electricity. “This lower power level will allow us to use a solar cell alone or with a much smaller battery,” Froelicher says. “We can also eliminate some expensive components while making the system easier and faster to set up.” The GE Foundation has made a grant to WaterStep to manufacture new tooling and lower production costs. Froelicher says that plastic injection molds would make manufacturing simpler, cut costs per unit by $40, and reduce overhead and logistics associated with moving parts for machining.

In Uganda, the devices are already catching and purifying water from large steel barrels that collect rain water running off roofs. They also providing a hands-on chemistry lesson. The nuns in Uganda are using the chlorine generators to teach their students how electrolysis works.

Smart Water: From Uganda to Pakistan, Two GE Volunteers Clean Water with Table Salt and Ingenuity

One day last November, GE engineer Steve Froelicher got a phone call from Sister Mary Ethel Parrott. Sister Mary Ethel is a nun, a teacher and a physicist who helped set up a boarding school for girls in rural Uganda. She needed clean water for her Ugandan pupils and Froelicher, a “senior product architect” who designs washing machines and water heaters at GE Appliances in Louisville, had just the thing for her.

For a whole year, Froelicher, his colleague Sam DuPlessis, and two GE retirees had volunteered every Wednesday night inside Froelicher’s Louisville garage, building an inexpensive water purification device the size of a tea kettle for WaterStep, a local charity. The device uses a car battery, a couple of electrodes, table salt, and some basic chemistry to make chlorine from brine and kill pathogens in polluted water. “The gas mixes with contaminated water much like carbon dioxide mixes with soda pop,” Froelicher says. “In Uganda, they can get their hands on salt, but they can’t get their hands on much more. With salt, a car battery and some solar panels you could be making clean water for years.”

Worth His Salt: Steve Froelicher, second from the right, and volunteers from GE and WaterStep built 100 chlorinators at Louisville's IdeaFestival held last week.

WaterStep, which is working to provide clean water to people in Haiti, India, Pakistan and 23 other developing countries around the world, estimates that a child dies every 20 second due to a waterborne illness and that 1.2 billion people, one sixth of the planet’s total, lack daily access to safe drinking water.

Froelicher and DuPlessis first heard from WaterStep in November 2010. A cholera epidemic had just hit Haiti. The non-profit was looking for a rugged, portable device made from ordinary materials that could treat 1,000 gallons of water in less than an hour. They started by asking a lot of questions. “We had to learn many details that were not part of our jobs,” Froelicher explains. “I’m not a chemical engineer and neither is Sam. Like any typical new product development, we had to go back to school to understand what we were trying to do to make an excellent device.”

Within weeks, they were making prototypes inside Froelicher’s garage, a basic handyman’s workshop with a vice, a drill, a saw and a handful of other woodworking tools. This turned out to be a blessing. “By limiting ourselves, we developed a simple design and assembly techniques,” DuPlessis says. The team went through a “battery of testing,” Froelicher says. When one prototype was too small and another too large, they made a third that was taller. They manufactured six protypes before they settled on a design.

The device fits inside a 10-inch PVC cylinder with two plastic tubes attached at the top. It strips chlorine from salt water by applying battery voltage across a circular membrane, a process called electrolysis. The chlorine bubbles off one of the electrodes and floats to the top where the device captures it and mixes it with contaminated water. The chlorine begins to oxidize organic matter and kills the pathogens in the water. The water is usually safe to drink two hours after chlorination.

In November 2011, a group of Louisville doctors serving in a flooded area in Pakistan asked WaterStep for 50 chlorinators. The GE volunteers moved production from Froelicher’s garage to the non-profit’s small workshop. “We did a five-week crash course in building these things,” DuPlessis says. But the Pakistan team got their order. Each device traveled as a kit of some 100 parts inside a rugged tote. “The kit has tubing and clamps, spare parts and all kinds of stuff they need to build a mini-water treatment system,” Froelicher says. “You can check it like luggage.”

After the first order, more GE volunteers signed on. The sourcing team jumped in, talked to suppliers who either discounted or donated materials for the cause, and slashed material costs by 50 percent. A lean manufacturing team set up a production line that could scale from making 10 chlorinators per day to producing hundreds if required.

Froelicher and DuPlessis are now working to reduce the required battery power from 120 watts to 25 watts. Sister Mary Ethel's school in Uganda can already recharge its chlorinator battery from a solar panel. Says Froelicher: “If we can pull that off, we can run the device on a very small solar panel practically anywhere in the world.”

Appetite for Destruction: Giant Fridge Shredder Hits 100,000 Milestone

Brian Conners likes to break things down. “I am a manufacturing engineer,” he says. “But I like taking things apart, rather than building them.” He’s got the perfect job. Conners is president and chief operating officer of ARCA Advanced Processing, which runs a hulking 40-foot shredder that can chomp down one two-door refrigerator-freezer to chip-sized bits every 50 seconds, or 600 of them per day. “Think of it as a giant paper shredder,” he says.

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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CuttingEdge.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Showing Its Teeth: Think of the 40-foot recycling behemoth as a giant paper shredder. Knives like these can cut up a refrigerator to chip-sized bits in 50 seconds.[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT1.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]Conners’ shredder is the only such machine in the U.S. manufactured by UNTHA Recycling Technologies (URT).[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT2.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system can process approximately one refrigerator per 50 seconds. [/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT4.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system can transform refrigerator insulating foam into pellets for use as fuel or other products.[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT5A.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system recovers approximately 95 percent of the insulating foam in refrigerators in a sealed system, reducing greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance emissions. [/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT6.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]“Industry Way” – one refrigerator’s shredded insulating foam which is typically landfilled (three large blue barrels). “The RAD Way” – one refrigerator’s degassed and pelletized insulating foam, which can be used as fuel or other products (lower, far right bucket).[/image]

[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/URT8.jpg" class="imagePlugin"]The URT system recovers high-quality plastics, aluminum, copper, steel and even pelletized foam. They can be used to make new products. Shown here: steel. [/image]

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Speed is only one of the machine’s virtues. Americans junk about nine million refrigerators and freezers every year. Most are recycled for metals at auto shredders along with cars. As a result, the plastics and the insulating foam, suffused with blowing agents like the ozone-depleting Freon and potent greenhouse gases, end up in landfills and in the atmosphere. The shredder can recover approximately 95 percent of the insulating foam and the harmful gasses in it. “The environmental benefit of treating the foam is tremendous,” he says.

GE partnered with Conners' joint-venture partner, Appliance Recycling Centers of America, in 2009. GE ships to Conners old refrigerators from customers who buy a new one from The Home Depot and other retailers connected to GE’s vast appliance distribution network. Since last summer, the shredder recycled 100,000 refrigerators and fridges, diverting 5.5 million pounds of foam and plastics from landfills for reuse. Pellets of the “degassed” foam, for example, can be used as fuel in cement manufacturing. “GE is the first and only appliance manufacturer to implement the EPA’s Responsible Appliance Disposal Program,” says Mark Vachon, GE’s vice president for ecomagination. “We are reducing emissions of ozone depleting substances, greenhouse gasses and the amount of waste entering our landfills, and protecting our air and water.”

Conners’ plant is in Philadelphia, but on a typical day trucks haul in old fridges from a dozen eastern states between Vermont and North Carolina. “They don’t come in at the same rate every day,” Conners says. “In the summer and during the holiday season we get more. But we take all brands.” Workers at the recycling plant first remove cords, shelves, the refrigerant and oil from the compressor.

A conveyor belt takes the empty fridge shell inside a sealed vacuum chamber, where large knives made from hardened steel cut it to bits one and half inches long. The machine then mechanically sorts out the different materials. Air suction hoods pull off the foam, magnets handle steel, and special “eddy current separators” handle aluminum and copper. The final recycling product, plastics, exits in large bags.

The recycling machine automatically pumps out the harmful gasses trapped in the shredding chamber and cools them down with liquid nitrogen to minus 90 degrees Celsius. At that freezing temperature, the gasses turn into liquids. The shredder bottles the liquefied gasses in tanks, and workers ship them for destruction to a special incinerator in Arkansas. “It’s the cutting edge of technology,” Conners says.