Dyson’s new air purifiers look like jet engines. There’s a good reason why (HT Tech)

For years, that futuristic-looking loop has been as Dyson as the purple-ish colour palette, powerful motors and products that occasionally look like they belong in a sci-fi movie than your living room.

But Matt Jennings, Dyson Engineering Director for Home, thinks it is time for something better.

“One of my favourite things about working at Dyson is we’re always asking ourselves if there’s a better way,” Jennings tells me.

That better way is called HushJet.

And yes, it looks a little bit like an aircraft engine.

There is actually a reason for that. The HushJet nozzle takes inspiration from aircraft “hush kits”, along with the precision concentrators used across Dyson’s hair care range. The idea is fairly simple: move a lot of air, but make it calmer, smoother and quieter while doing so.

The engineering behind it is anything but simple.

Jennings says Dyson wanted to push more air through its purifiers without turning them into noisy machines that dominate the room. And therein lies the engineering headache. More airflow generally means more energy consumption and more noise.

“You’ve got to do well to make a good air purifier to work in the real world,” Jennings says.

With HushJet, Dyson is trying to get around that trade-off by calming the air as it exits the machine, reducing turbulence and keeping the airflow smoother.

The result, according to Jennings, is a machine that delivers four times the clean air rate of its predecessor while being quieter and using less energy.

Even at its maximum speed setting of 10, he claims you should still be able to have a conversation or watch television without the purifier rudely becoming part of either.

And achieving all of that meant saying goodbye to one of Dyson’s most recognisable designs.

“We had to redesign the whole system to be lower pressure and able to tolerate a higher flow rate,” Jennings says. “And that meant, sadly, we had to move away from our Air Multiplier design.”

There is something refreshingly interesting about that admission.

A company famous for a particular piece of engineering has decided that the engineering itself needs changing.

Jennings points to the HushJet Big+Quiet Pure Cool, Dyson’s flagship purifier.

It delivers more than 1,200 cubic metres of purified air every hour. According to Jennings, that is enough clean air for the daily intake of two people in just 30 seconds.

But the more interesting bit is how Jennings breaks down the job of an air purifier.

There are essentially 3 things it needs to get right, according to him: sense pollution, capture it and then actually move the cleaned air around the room.

The new machines use a suite of sensors to detect ultrafine dust, particles, odours and chemicals including formaldehyde. They then react to those pollutants, capture them using a three-stage filtration system and use the HushJet nozzle to distribute the cleaned air around the space.

That last bit matters more than it sounds.

Because a very powerful purifier sitting quietly in one corner isn’t particularly useful if the clean air never reaches the other side of your giant living room.

Dyson is consequently building different HushJet machines around different homes and use cases. There is a more compact Pure Cool, a Hot+Cool that combines heating, cooling and purification, and the flagship Big+Quiet for larger spaces.

Jennings says the latter can clean spaces of up to 360 square metres and is powerful enough to work across an open-plan environment, including multiple rooms if doors are kept open.

Jennings is no exception.

“I’m really excited for what AI is going to afford us,” he says. “We want to make our machines more intelligent and more convenient to use for our customers.”

Except Dyson’s interpretation of AI gets quite interesting when you put it inside something as mundane as an air purifier.

Jennings points to Dyson’s Find-and-Follow purifier, which uses a camera system and machine learning to recognise people in a room and understand their position.

The purifier can then physically adjust itself to keep airflow directed towards them.

Jennings gives me a wonderfully ordinary example: cooking.

You’re chopping something, moving towards the hob, checking the microwave and generally bouncing around the kitchen. Instead of constantly readjusting your purifier, the machine can follow your movement and keep its airflow focused on you.

That is the sort of AI that sounds slightly ridiculous when you first hear about it, but starts making considerably more sense when someone explains why you’d actually use it.

“And I think there’s much more in the pipeline to come,” Jennings says.

Naturally, he isn’t telling me what.

At least, it was supposed to be rapid-fire.

Jennings’ favourite Dyson product this year is the HushJet Mini Cool, a portable fan that apparently became something of a lifesaver during the UK’s recent heatwave.

I’d actually seen the little thing earlier in Singapore, where it made considerably more sense to me while standing around sweating.

Jennings starts explaining the engineering again.

I remind him this is supposed to be rapid-fire.

But I’ll give him a pass. The man really likes his tech.

Ask him what immediately comes to mind when he thinks about Dyson and his answer is equally unsurprising.

“Masters of airflow.”

It is the sort of answer you’d expect from an engineering director, but after spending the conversation discussing aircraft hush kits, turbulence, filtration, pressure systems and machines that can literally follow you around a kitchen, you begin to understand why he says it.

And perhaps that is the more interesting story behind Dyson’s latest products.

Underneath the AI, futuristic nozzles, cameras and enormous airflow figures, the problem its engineers are obsessing over remains wonderfully basic: how do you move air from one place to another, better?

For Dyson, answering that question meant being willing to kill one of its most recognisable designs.

And Jennings seems rather excited about what comes next.