A Tale of a Scratchy Toothbrush
"Dad, your toothbrush sounds scratchy!" said my daughter a few days ago. Both of us use electric toothbrushes. Mine is more than 10 years old, whereas her's is less than a year old. Come to think of it, my toothbrush is older than my daughter. "What do you mean?" I asked. "I don’t know, it just sounds scratchy." Hmm, how do I quantify this so-called "scratchiness?" With a bit more time at hand these days, and also a vibrometer, I thought I could measure the dynamic response of both the toothbrushes when activated.
What I noticed is that there was indeed a difference in the "cleanliness" of the spectrum (blue = new; red = old in the plot) between the two brushes. The response was similar with and without the brush-head attached to the body. You see quite a few peaks with the older toothbrush, whereas the response is clean, and at a single frequency, and much higher (amplitude) with the newer model. With my toothbrush, it's hard to tell what the dominant frequency is. I guess it is time for a new toothbrush!
So there we have it. We have just quantified scratchy behavior! Wishing you all good health in these trying times.
Student for life
11 个月I bought a new toothbrush (not just a brush-head) a few days ago. It reminded me of this post. Obviously the first thing to do was to measure it's vibration characteristics. This time I used our #VibroGo. Whereas the old one (red) has energy spread all over the spectrum, the new one (blue) has one clean peak. It does seem that the new design uses a lower fundamental frequency. Interesting.
Process Engineer, Applied Materials
4 年Beautiful
Product Manager at Polytec GmbH
4 年That is the new way to keep our healthcare equipment in a good state. Ask you dentist for a toothbrush check. I guess every dentist has got a Laser Doppler Vibrometer available. Is there anybody form a toothbrush development team out there to comment on Vikrant's findings?
NVH Specialist
4 年What is the dominant frequency? I’d better check that of my teeth. :)
This is called data driven decision making!