When designing a new product, we look at how our product can help customers perform better and more efficiently. When looking at wands, we found that certain wands increased the performance of our machines while others decreased performance. By retesting our portable extractors at CRI using the Evolution, all of our heated portables of 300 psi and above changed from a bronze rating to GOLD, making U.S. Products portable extractors the first and only to attain this top Gold rating.
U.S. Products designed the Evolution carpet wand by understanding the theory of air flow. Air flows from a region of high pressure to an area of low pressure. When air flows at higher speeds, especially through an airway with irregular walls, flow is typically disorganized, even chaotic, and tends to form eddies. This is called turbulent flow (See Diagram 1). This is the type of air flow found today in most carpet wand designs. A comparatively large driving pressure is required to sustain turbulent flow. When you have turbulent flow, you must quadruple the driving pressure to double the flow rate.
When flow is at a low velocity and through narrow tubes, it tends to be more neat and streamlined, and flows in a straight line. This orderly flow is called laminar flow (See Diagram 2). Unlike turbulent flow, to double the flow rate with laminar flow, one needs to only double the driving pressure.
The Evolution is the first and only rotationally molded carpet wand that utilizes the benefits of laminar air flow. By smoothing the air flow, we have significantly increased air flow, thus improving water recovery performance.
Through scientific testing against many other traditional wands, we found that the Evolution left half the residual moisture in the carpet that the best performing test group wand removed. Watch the video for more details on the testing procedure.
