Dyson is known for their stylish, innovative and technologically advanced products.
You've definitely seen their hair dryers, vacuum cleaners amongst many others
posted widely on social media.
Their headquarters is located in Singapore and many of their products are actually developed here.
Today we're getting an exclusive tour of Dyson's facilities
and you'll find some interesting things they do behind the scenes
in creating some of their products.
I'm here with Low Chen who's going to give us the office tour today.
Welcome to Dyson Singapore Technology Centre
where we do our research and development work.
How long has Dyson been here
and when did headquarters move to Singapore?
Dyson started in Singapore in 2007.
In 2019, we shifted our headquarter to Singapore.
Before we head into the labs, I just want to show you our breakout area.
So this is where we take a break from work and also to brainstorm ideas.
What's it like working here, what's the culture?
I would say it's very fast paced, challenging, very exciting
and everyone here has a passion for problem solving
Now I'm going to show you our acoustic lab
and this is where we test the acoustic performance of our products.
This is Nicklaus and he's going to bring you into the semi-anechoic chamber.
Wow Nicklaus, I'm very used to studio rooms which are already very very quiet
but this is like next level kind of a silence.
I guess it would be appropriate to say silence is deafening.
You're right so in this chamber,
it actually causes you to stumble,
so actually if you close your eyes and stay silent for a while
you will actually feel that you are rocking
because your ears are not used to the low pressure here
or the low sound pressure in this room.
And what we do here is we actually try to optimise the performance of the Dyson product
which is in the middle for its acoustic performance
so when a user uses it, it doesn't annoy you with the kind of sound that it produces.
So this room is called the semi-anechoic chamber.
Semi basically means there are 10 mics
and they form what we call a hemisphere.
So the 10 microphones actually all converge to the point in the middle where the product is.
Now anechoic basically means there's no echoes,
so whatever the mics pick up, it's mainly coming from the product,
they don't get any reflections.
How quiet is this space exactly?
So if you compare it to a quiet bedroom, the bedroom is about maybe 35 to 40dB.
This room can go to as low as 18dB,
so it allows us to basically measure any products below what it would be like in the bedroom environment
so that when we produce the product,
we know that it's actually very quiet in a bedroom environment
so that the user doesn't get annoyed
say when they're using a filter fan for example when they're sleeping.
Welcome to our styling performance lab and this is Janelle,
she's going to show you a bit of what we do in this lab.
I see many types of hair,
how many types of hair do you have exactly?
So we actually work with a wide variety of hair types,
ranging from thin to thick,
from straight to wavy to curly and even coily hair.
This is actually very important
because we want to make sure our technology works for different people
with different hair types all over the world.
So we have a few rigs here
to evaluate how well we dry or style our hair using our technology.
So one of them is actually the supersonic test rig.
This rig is developed to give us a consistent method of drying hair.
It basically simulates how a real world user would dry their hair.
We also have a test rig that's specially developed for our airwrap styler.
So in this case we are understanding how well it can curl hair using the curling barrels.
There you have,
perfect bouncy curl!
So once this test is done, we will bring this hair tress over to the hair imaging rig for further analysis.
So what this wig does is it will take standardised high definition photographs
of the hair tress as within the box.
We will then compare this hair tress with a golden standard image
to evaluate its qualities such as style and shine.
So would you say they are comparable?
Just looking at this picture I would say that the ends are not very perfectly styled
so there might be some tweaking that's needed.
This is our Fluid Dynamics Lab and I'm going to leave you with Eshwar and he'll tell you more.
When you notice Dyson's products, they have really powerful airflow
and for the supersonic, that is generated by the V9 motor.
The V9 motor generates 3500 pascals of pressure
and that is my job to use that pressure to generate an airflow that can help with styling hair.
So we do that using different experiments,
so what I'm going to be showing you today is one such experiment called the Schlieren Imaging.
When we work with air, one of the challenges we face as engineers
is that we can't really see air and this setup helps us with that.
We use a concave mirror and a camera setup to magnify that effect,
so we can pretty much see density variations in air.
So we can try attachments.
So attachments provide different types of styling
so they need different types of airflow, so you can see this is more diffused.
and our concentrated for example, deliver more flat stream of air
you can see, it doesn't diverge much.
Whereas when I use a wider nozzle,
you can see that the flow diverges outwards
helping with a different type of style suitable for this attachment.
Welcome to our Prototyping Lab, this is Haikal and I'll let him explain to you more.
Prototyping allows Dyson's engineers to test out new ideas and concepts
and have this concept translated into a physical part
that we can conduct physical test on.
We produce a variety of 3D prototypes to support the product development process.
I see many different prototyping machines around the area,
can you tell me how many different types there are and what do they do?
So in this lab, we have four different types of prototyping machines.
If you want a part with smooth finish, you can use this stereolithography machine.
If you want a part for very quick turnaround in a couple of hours,
you can use the polyjet printer for it's quick printing time.
So how long does it take to make a prototype?
It depends on the method and the part.
Some parts can take up to a couple of minutes and some parts take a day.
So after prototyping, we proceed with product development in this lab
and Steven will share more details with you.
This is pretty much the final part of the engineering process, what do you do here?
We customise mini assembly lines to actually study the every single component
so that we can lay out in a logical and effective manner
to help the manufacturing produce our machines in scale.
And where does this lab sit in with the wider design and development process?
So when we are in the design development process, it's actually the early concept phase.
Every time we have a new idea, we can easily just send our design over to the prototyping lab,
and within a few hours to a few days, we can just pop over, collect our parts
and then we can all sit down as a team over here,
that's where we look at the functioning prototype testing as well.
Now we are going to bring you to Singapore Advanced Manufacturing Facility,
which manufacture our Dyson patented digital motor.
I'm here at Dyson's manufacturing facility with Yvonne who's going to be showing me around.
Can these motors be found in all Dyson products, what makes them so special?
All these Dyson digital motor actually is the heart of our product
and it actually can be found in our airwrap,
supersonic, air blade hand dryer, and cord-free vacuum cleaners.
Specific to this facility, how many motors does Dyson make throughout the year?
So we can actually make 13 million Dyson digital motor of this facility per year.
13 million?? No big deal.
Yvonne, I noticed that there are more machines than humans here.
Yes you're right.
In fact there's about 300 autonomous machines right here working
and the motor here spins at 125 000 rpm
and we also have to ensure the quality and repeatability
that human cannot do that because they will actually have fatigue.
What I have here is some of the motor parts
and this roto assembly has to go into the frame
and the glue adhesive needle has to come precisely to this position
and dispense the right amount of glue to join them together.
This next station is actually a winding station.
So this station actually wind the copper cable in high precision in engineering.
Next we come to this fantastic four with the four robots.
The robot like a replacement of a human hand has to grab this copper wire
and actually give it a bit of slack and insert into this tiny slot here.
So actually just now what I've shown you is just few of our advanced and highly automated and precise machine.
I've definitely seen a different side to Dyson today,
but nonetheless it's a really great lesson point for me.
Thank you Yvonne for taking me around!
We've come to the end of today's episode.
You usually see the final product on the stands
but today just really going behind the scenes and learning about the conceptualisation
down to the process of it, it's very eye-opening.
The next time you see a Dyson product,
you'll think about what it takes to make a product truly Dyson.
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I'll catch you in the next one!