• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.15 no.7 s.100
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• pp.821-828
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• 2005

In our life, we have used many digital appliances. They help us to improve the quality of life but sometimes give us unsatisfactory result. Because they produce specific noise. Especially vacuum cleaner produce much noise that is very annoying. So we need to study what sound metrics affect human sensibility. In this paper, we develop sound quality index for vacuum cleaner using the sound quality metrics defined in psychoacoustics. First, we carry out the subjective evaluation of vacuum cleaner sound to verify what vacuum sound feels good to human. And then artificial neural network estimated the complexity and the nonlinear characteristics of the relations between subjective evaluation and sound metrics. Finally the ANN is trained repeatedly to have a good performance for sound qualify index of the vacuum cleaner. As a result, the sound quality index of vacuum cleaner has a correlation of $93.5\%$ between the subjective evaluation and ANN. So, there exist three factors that Is loudness, sharpness, roughness which affect the sound quality of vacuum cleaner.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.1003-1008
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• 2004

In our life, we have used many digital appliances. They helped us to improve the quality of lift but sometimes gave us unsatisfactory result because they produce specific noise. Especially a vacuum cleaner produces a great deal of noise that is very annoying. So we need to study what sound metrics affect human sensibility. In this paper, we will study sound quality index for vacuum cleaner. The subjective evaluation of vacuum cleaner sound can be indicated to objective parameters by sound metrics of psychoacoustics. The artificial neural network can estimate the nonlinear characteristics of relation between subjective evaluation and sound metrics. We applied the artificial neural network to the development of sound quality index for vacuum sound.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.1297-1301
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• 2007

The Conventional noise control attempts to simply reduce the level of product noise. But it is very straight forward way that we have consider human perception on noise. Since human listening is very sensitive to sound. Evaluation of the sound quality of a Vacuum Cleaner is studied base on human sensibility engineering. In this paper, we choose two Vacuum Cleaners that are sold in Korea and reduced noise control. Comparison Method is used to evaluate noise and preference of Vacuum Cleaner by steps. The sound quality of Vacuum Cleaner noise is analyzed by employing the subjective evaluation and by representing them in terms of the objective quantities. Semantic Differential Method is used to study sound quality Evaluation. To analyze the sound quality of Vacuum Cleaner noise, consider the coefficients of correlation between sound metrics and subjective rating. The linear regression models were obtained for the subjective evaluation and sound quality metrics.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.112-120
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• 2008

Today, the use of a vacuum cleaner gave us the higher quality of life than past time, but sometimes made us w1comfortable in the house because of the specific noise that is annoying. So we need to study how sound absorbtion materials affect sound power level and sound quality with sound metrics. In this paper, we will measure and calculate sound power level for vacuum cleaner and analyze characteristics of the noise for 10 Signals according to materials positioned in vacuum cleaner. The multiple regression analysis can estimate the nonlinear characteristics of relation between subjective evaluation and sound metrics. So we will develop sound quality index for vacuum sound.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.20 no.12
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• pp.1223-1228
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• 2010

The conventional noise control attempts to simply reduce the level of product noise. But it is very straight forward way that we have considered human perception on noise. Since human listening is very sensitive to sound. Evaluation of the sound quality of a vacuum cleaner is studied base on human sensibility engineering. In this paper, we choose six vacuum cleaners that are sold in Korea and reduced noise control. The sound quality of vacuum cleaner noise is analyzed by employing the subjective evaluation and by representing them in terms of the objective quantities. Semantic differential method is used to study sound quality Evaluation. To analyze the sound quality of vacuum cleaner noise, consider the coefficients of correlation between sound metrics and subjective rating. The linear regression models were obtained for the subjective evaluation and sound quality metrics.

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

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.460-466
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• 2003

The aeroacoustic characteristics and noise reduction method of a centrifugal fan for a bagless vacuum cleaner were studied. The major noise source of vacuum cleaner is the centrifugal fan. The impeller of the fan rotates over 30000 rpm and generates very high-level piercing noise. It was found that the dominant noise source of the fan is generated from the aerodynamic interaction between the highly rotating impeller and stationary diffuser. In order to reduce the high tonal sound generated from the aerodynamic interaction between the impeller and diffuser, tapered impeller was carefully designed and tested. The trailing edge of the tapered impeller was inclined and this reduces the flow interactions between the rotating impeller and the stationary diffuser because of some phase shift. The static efficiency of the new impeller is slightly lower than the conventional one. The overall SPL is reduced about 3.6 dBA. The SPL of blade passing frequency(BPF) is reduced about 6 dBA and the $2^{nd}$ BPF is reduced about 20 dBA. The vacuum cleaner with the tapered impeller has lower noise level than that of the previous impeller and the strong tonal sound was dramatically reduced.

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

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.146-147
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• 2010

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.258-264
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose an objective quality feature which is based on the human auditory system to measure vacuum cleaner noise. It is observed that some frequency bands are more sensitive to the human auditory system. Therefore, we divided the audible frequency range of vacuum cleaner noise into a number of frequency bands and the average energy of these bands was calculated. Among a number of average energies, an average energy of a frequency band was selected as the proposed feature. In order to test the performance of the proposed feature, fourteen vacuum cleaners were chosen and the noise was recorded in an anechoic-chamber. Then we performed subjective tests to obtain subjective scores of the noise data using the PCM (paired comparison method) and ACR (absolute category rating) subjective methods. The proposed objective quality feature shows high correlation with the subjective scores.