• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
• /
• v.22 no.3 s.168
• /
• pp.46-51
• /
• 2005

The vacuum cleaner motor runs at very high speed for suction power. Specially, motor power is provided by the impeller being rotated at very high speed. The centrifugal fan consists of the impeller, the diffuser, and the circular casing. Due to the high rotating speed of the impeller and small gap distance between the impeller and the diffuser, the level of noise in the centrifugal fan is at BPF(Blade Passage Frequency) and its harmonic frequencies. In order to calculate the sound pressure of centrifugal fan, unsteady flow data are needed. The cause of noise is obtained by dividing the fluid noise by exhaust flow of fan and vibration noise by rotational vibration of vacuum cleaner fan motor. Until now, an accelerometer has been used to measure vibration. However, it can not measure vibration in some parts of brush and commutator because of motor construction and 3-D vibrating mode. This study was conducted to perform accurate analysis of vibration and aerodynamic sound for fan motor in a vacuum cleaner using a laser vibration analyzer. A silent fan motor can be designed using the data measured in this study.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.56-63
• /
• 2004

Recently technology resulted in highly efficient and multiple-functional electric appliances considering environmental problems. One of the environmental problems is noise of a product in respect to its function. A vacuum cleaner is an essential electric appliance in our daily lives. However, severe noise resulted from high motor speed for improving the function of the appliance is a nuisance for the user. This noise is caused by vibration from various parts of the appliance and fluid noise during a series of intake and exhaust processes while rotating the impeller connected to the axle at a high speed of the fan motor inside the vacuum cleaner rotating around 30,000-35,000rpm. Despite the fact that many researchers conducted studies on reducing the noise level of the fan motor in a vacuum cleaner, only few studies have been conducted considering both the theoretical and experimental aspects using fluid analysis by measuring vibration and noise. Moreover, there has not been a study that accurately compared major noise data obtained considering both of the aspects. In this study, both aspects were considered by considering the following experimental and theoretical methods to verify the major causes of noise from the fan motor in a vacuum cleaner.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
• /
• 2004.10a
• /
• pp.399-405
• /
• 2004

Recently technology resulted in highly efficient and multiple-functional electric appliances considering environmental problems. One of the environmental problems is noise of a product in respect to its function. A vacuum cleaner is an essential electric appliance in our daily lives. However, severe noise resulted from high motor speed for improving the function of the appliance is a nuisance for the user. This noise is caused by vibration from various parts of the appliance and fluid noise during a series of intake and exhaust processes while rotating the impeller connected to the axle at a high speed of the fan motor inside the vacuum cleaner rotating around 30,000-35,000 rpm. Despite the fact that many researchers conducted studies on reducing the noise level of the fan motor in a vacuum cleaner, only few studies have been conducted considering both the theoretical and experimental aspects using fluid analysis by measuring vibration and noise. Moreover, there has not been a study that accurately compared major noise data obtained considering both of the aspects. In this study, both aspects were considered by considering the following experimental and theoretical methods to verify the major causes of noise from the fan motor in a vacuum cleaner.

• 한국전산유체공학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2008.03b
• /
• pp.522-525
• /
• 2008

A vacuum cleaner is the widely used home equipment. However, it has a trouble with too much power consumption. Most losses occur at the centrifugal fan. To remedy this trouble the investigation of motor, which is the main component of vacuum cleaner, is required. The flow characteristics around the high-speed rotating centrifugal fan which is influenced by the very low inlet pressure is quite different from a commonly used fan. Hence it is quite difficult to analyze the flow by the experimental means or by the numerical simulation. In this research, it is aimed to improve the air-suction performance of a vacuum cleaner through the flow analysis around a motor. The efficiency of the centrifugal fan is affected by blade shape, blade number, blade pitch, etc. The influence of the shape of impeller on the flow is investigated in this study. The flow around the centrifugal fan is simulated by applying the moving mesh. To verify the validity of the computation results, the air flow rate and the pressure field to the cleaner is compared with the experimental data. All simulations are performed by using commercial code SC/Tetra. The calculated results show good agreement with the experimental ones and it is believed to be promising to use computational simulation in the improvement of the vacuum cleaner performance.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.5-14
• /
• 2017

A fan-motor assembly in a vacuum cleaner is analyzed through system-level analysis method. This system consisted of three components, a fan, motor, and the flow resistance of the motor, or of the vacuum cleaner. System-level analysis method is characterized by the combination of torque matching at a constant throttling condition between the fan and the motor and the pressure drop at a constant flow rate due to the flow resistance of the motor, or of the vacuum cleaner. The performance characteristics of the fan-motor assembly and the vacuum cleaner system could be predicted over the whole range of operation, based on the characteristics of each component. The predicted performance of the vacuum cleaner system through system-level analysis agreed well with the experimental results within 4.5% difference of pressure and 6% difference of the efficiency. The effect of flow resistance of a motor is investigated and it is found that the efficiency decrease of fan-motor assembly at the constant flow rate due to the flow resistance of a motor is determined by the flow resistance ratio(FRR), which is defined as a ratio of flow resistance of motor and the flow resistance of a constant throttling condition of a given point. The fan-motor assembly(S2 model) was modified to reduce the FRR from 9.0% to 2.4% and the experimental result shows that the efficiency of S2 model was improved by about 3% at best efficiency point.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
• /
• 2004.04a
• /
• pp.281-286
• /
• 2004

The vacuum cleaner motor runs on very high speed for the suction power. Specially, the motive power is provided by the impeller being rotate on very high speed. And centrifugal fan consists of the impeller, the diffuser, and the circular casing. Due to the high rotating speed or the impeller and small gap distance between the impeller and diffuser, the centrifugal fan makes very high noise level at BPF and harmonic frequencies. In order to calculate the sound pressure of centrifugal fan, the unsteady flow data is needed. And Noise cause is dividing to fluid noise by exhaust flow of fan and vibration noise by rotational vibration of vacuum cleaner fan motor. Until now, measuring method has been used to measure vibration by the accelerometer; this method has been not measured for the vibration in some parts of brush and commutator because of motor construction and 3-D vibrating mode. This paper was purposed on the accurate analysis, using laser vibration analyzer,. By using this measured data of noise cause against the difficult part in old times, we would like to use for the design of silent fan motor.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
• /
• 2006.10a
• /
• pp.271-272
• /
• 2006

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
• /
• 2007.11a
• /
• pp.939-942
• /
• 2007

Vacuum cleaner is a close life product that can remove various dusts from our surroundings. However well vacuum cleaner clean our environments, many people are looking away from it, due to its loud noise. Its noise causes a big trouble in the usual life, for example, catch calls, TV watching and discussing etc. To reduce these inconveniences, noise reduction methods and systematic design of low noise vacuum cleaner are studied in this paper. At first, sound quality investigation is performed to get the noise level and quality that make people TV watching and catch calls available. Based on the European and domestic customer SQ survey result, sound power, peak noise level and target sound spectrum guideline are studied and introduced. As a second, precise product sound spectrums are designed into each part based on the sound quality result. Fan-motor, brush, mainbody, cyclone spectrums are decided to get the final target sound based on the contribution level. Fan-motor is the major noise source of vacuum cleaner. Specially, its peak sound, RPM peak and BPF Peak, cause the people nervous. To reduce these peak sounds, high rotating impeller and diffuser are focused due to its interaction. A lot of experimental and numerical tests, operation points are investigated and optimization of flow path area between diffusers is performed. As a bagless device, cyclones are one of the major noise sources of vacuum cleaner. To reduce its noise, previous research is used and adopted well. Brush is the most difficult part to reduce noise. Its noise sources are all comes from aero-acoustic phenomena. Numerical analysis helps the understanding of flow structure and pattern, and a lot of experimental test are performed to reduce the noise. Gaps between the carpet and brush are optimized and flow paths are re-designed to lower the noise. Reduction is performed with keeping the cleaning efficiency and handling power together and much reduction of noise is acquired. With all above parts, main-body design is studied. To do a systematic design, configuration design developments technique is introduced from airplane design and evolved with each component design. As a first configuration, fan-motor installation position is investigated and 10 configuration ideas are developed and tested. As a second step, reduced size and compressed configuration candidates are tested and evaluated by a lot of major factor. Noise, power, mass production availability, size, flow path are evaluated together. If noise reduction configuration results in other performance degrade, the noise reduction configuration is ineffective. As a third configuration, cyclones are introduced and the size is reduced one more time and fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh configuration are evolved with size and design image with noise and other performance indexes. Finally we can get a overall much noise level reduction configuration. All above investigations are adopted into vacuum cleaner design and final customer satisfaction tests in Europe are performed. 1st grade sound quality and lowest noise level of bagless vacuum cleaner are achieved.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
• /
• v.18 no.2
• /
• pp.185-192
• /
• 2004

The aeroacoustic characteristics of a centrifugal fan for a vacuum cleaner and its noise reduction method are studied in this paper. The major noise source of a vacuum cleaner is the centrifugal fan. The impeller of the fan rotates at over 30000 rpm, and generates very high-level noise. It was revealed that the dominant noise source is the aerodynamic interaction between the rotating impeller and stationary diffuser. The directivity of acoustic pressure showed that most of the noise propagates backward direction of the fan-motor assembly. In order to reduce the high tonal sound generated from the aerodynamic interaction, unevenly pitched impeller and diffuser, and tapered impeller designs were proposed and experiments were performed. Uneven pitch design of the impeller changes the sound quality while the overall sound power level (SPL) and the performance remains similar. The effect of the tapered design of impeller was evaluated. The trailing edge of the tapered fan is inclined. This reduces the flow interaction between the rotating impeller and the stationary diffuser because of some phase shifts. The static efficiency of the new impeller design is slightly lower than the previous design. However, the overall SPL is reduced by about 4 dB(A). The SPL of the fundamental blade passing frequency (BPF) is reduced by about 6 dB (A) and the 2$\^$nd/ BPF is reduced about 20 dB (A). The vacuum cleaner with the tapered impeller design produces lower noise level than the previous one, and the strong tonal sound was dramatically reduced.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.39 no.5
• /
• pp.379-389
• /
• 2020

In this study, the flow and noise performances of high-speed fan motor unit for cordless vacuum cleaner is improved by optimizing the impeller which drives the suction air through flow passage of the cordless vacuum cleaner. Firstly, the unsteady incompressible Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are solved to investigate the flow through the fan motor unit using the computational fluid dynamics techniques. Based on flow field results, the Ffowcs-Williams and Hawkings (FW-H) integral equation is used to predict flow noise radiated from the impeller. Predicted results are compared to the measured ones, which confirms the validity of the numerical method used. It is found that the strong vortex is formed around the mid-chord region of the main blades where the blade curvature change rapidly. Given that vortex acts as a loss for flow and a noise source for noise, impeller blade is redesigned to suppress the identified vortex. The response surface method using two factors is employed to determine the optimum inlet and outlet sweep angles for maximum flow rate and minimum noise. Further analysis of finally selected design confirms the improved flow and noise performance.