Performance Improvement of a Vacuum Cleaner by Analysis of the Flow Around Motor

A cleaner has trouble with too much noise and power consumption. To solve these problems, the investigation for motors, which are the main component of vacuum cleaner, is required. However, it is difficult to analyze the flow by the experimental means because of the high speed of the fan rotation ranging from 30,000 rpm to 50,000 rpm. Moreover it takes much time to perform the numerical simulation for the flow. In this research, it is aimed to analyze the flow through the centrifugal fan which is believed to be a main noise source, by the computational method. The efficiency of the centrifugal fan is affected by friction loss, impact loss and so on. Those losses depend on factors like the velocity of impeller, blade shape and etc. The influence of the shape of impeller on the flow is investigated in this study. The computational analysis was done by changing impeller shapes. 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 qualitatively and it is believed to be promising to use computational simulation in the improvement of the vacuum cleaner performance.