SAMSUNG DW80B7071US/AA Dishwasher: Revolutionizing Clean with StormWash+ and Smart Drying

It’s not just a machine; it’s a precisely engineered arena where the fundamental laws of science wage a relentless war on grime.

It began, as many great inventions do, with frustration and fine china. In 1886, a wealthy socialite named Josephine Cochrane, tired of her servants chipping her heirloom dishes, declared, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.” And she did. Her creation—a copper boiler containing a wire rack that was cranked by hand as hot, soapy water rained down—was a clunky, steam-belching marvel. It was the first act in a long play of domesticating the raw power of science for the simple, thankless task of washing up.

Fast forward to today. The modern dishwasher is a silent, sleek monolith, a far cry from Cochrane’s rattling contraption. Yet, within its stainless-steel walls, the same fundamental forces she first harnessed—water, heat, and mechanics—are now directed with a physicist’s precision. It has become a quiet laboratory, a place where fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and acoustics converge to perform a minor miracle every evening. To truly appreciate this everyday genius, we need to look past the buttons and see the invisible principles at play.

The Brutal Ballet of Water

Cleaning is, at its essence, an act of force. You must dislodge stubborn, baked-on remnants of a meal from a surface. While Josephine Cochrane used a torrent, modern engineering has refined this into a science: fluid dynamics.

Imagine trying to clean a plate with a gentle, steady stream of water. This is known as laminar flow—smooth, predictable, and largely ineffective. To clean, you need chaos. You need turbulent flow, a roiling, energetic state where water molecules move in complex, swirling patterns. This chaos ensures that water attacks grime from an infinite number of angles, scouring and lifting it away.

The primary goal of a dishwasher’s interior design is to create and direct controlled turbulence. This is where engineering elevates a simple spray into a calculated assault. Consider, for instance, a system like the StormWash+ found in a modern Samsung dishwasher. This isn’t merely about spraying more water; it’s a choreographed attack. Dual wash arms create broad, overlapping fields of fire, while a dedicated, high-pressure rotating jet acts as a targeted sniper. This jet, forcing water through a precisely shaped nozzle, leverages Bernoulli’s principle: as the water is constricted, its speed increases dramatically, creating a powerful, scouring force. The claim of covering “1.5x more space” isn’t a marketing line; it’s a geometric result of a system designed to leave no surface untouched by the cleansing chaos of turbulence. This is the art of bending water to your will.

The Alchemy of Heat and Air

If getting dishes clean is the first challenge, getting them dry is the far more subtle and often frustrating second act. We’ve all experienced it: opening the dishwasher to find sparkling glasses next to disappointingly damp plastic containers. This isn’t a flaw in the machine; it’s a lesson in thermodynamics.

The culprit is a property known as specific heat capacity. Ceramic and glass are dense and have a high capacity to hold heat. After the final hot rinse, they retain enough thermal energy to evaporate the water droplets clinging to their surfaces. Plastic, with its low thermal mass, cools off almost instantly, leaving water with nowhere to go.

To solve this, engineers had to move beyond passive, residual-heat drying and embrace active thermodynamic manipulation. The process can be seen as a two-act play, perfectly illustrated by a feature like Smart Dry with AutoRelease.

Act I: The Hot Air Bath. The cycle doesn’t just end with a rinse. A heating element warms the air inside the sealed tub. This warm air can hold significantly more moisture, and it accelerates the evaporation of water from every surface—even the stubborn plastics. The internal environment becomes a miniature sauna, saturated with water vapor.

Act II: The Great Escape. Here lies the simple stroke of genius. The door automatically pops open a few inches. This action instantly changes the entire thermodynamic equation. The hot, humid air inside—now at a higher pressure—rushes out, and cooler, drier ambient air is drawn in. This breaks the state of equilibrium. The “thirsty” outside air eagerly absorbs the remaining moisture, creating a gentle convection current that whisks away the last traces of dampness. This elegant application of physical principles is why such a system can boast a “2.5x better drying performance.” It’s not magic; it’s a masterful manipulation of heat, pressure, and air.

Taming the Indoor Hurricane

To accomplish all this, a dishwasher must unleash what is essentially a controlled, indoor hurricane of high-pressure water. Yet, one of the most prized features of a premium model is its silence. Containing this violent process and reducing its roar to a whisper is a profound challenge in acoustic engineering.

The decibel (dBA) scale used to measure sound is logarithmic, which means our perception of loudness is tricky. A dishwasher rated at 52 dBA is not just a little louder than one rated at 42 dBA; the difference in sound energy is immense. A 10 dB reduction represents a tenfold decrease in sound intensity. Achieving that quiet is a systems-level triumph.

The sound of a dishwasher comes from multiple sources: the hum of the motor, the sloshing of water, and, most significantly, the percussive impact of thousands of water jets hitting metal, glass, and plastic. Taming this cacophony involves a multi-layered defense:

• Vibration Damping: The motor and pump are mounted on dampeners to prevent their vibrations from turning the entire machine into a speaker.
• Material Science: The use of a rigid, heavy stainless-steel tub is an acoustic choice. Unlike a flimsy plastic tub that can resonate and amplify noise, steel contains it.
• Insulation: Layers of sound-absorbing material, often borrowed from the automotive industry, wrap the exterior, soaking up stray sound waves and converting their energy into imperceptible heat.
  
  The result is a machine that can wage a furious war on last night’s lasagna while you have a conversation just a few feet away, completely undisturbed. It is a testament to the engineers who learned how to contain a storm in a box and command it to be silent.

From a socialite’s mechanical curiosity to a silent, intelligent appliance, the dishwasher’s evolution mirrors our own growing mastery over the physical world. It stands as a humble monument to applied science, a daily reminder that the most powerful forces—the flow of water, the transfer of heat, the propagation of sound—can be understood, tamed, and put to work for us. It’s the hidden genius in our homes, waiting quietly for the next meal.