• 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.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2004.07a
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• pp.194-194
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• 2004

This paper presents Single Phase SRM for the vacuum cleaner. The advantage of SRM is long life time, high suction power.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2001.07a
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• pp.247-251
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• 2001

Universal motors are mainly used for vacuum cleaner application. There are a lot of researches on SRM that applys home appliance throughout the world. The manufacturing cost of SRM drive makes it hard to expand its application to home appliance. This paper presents Single Phase SRM for the vacuum cleaner that has advantge in cost and performance over conventional universal motor. This paper proposes new power device driving scheme by using SRM switching characteristic. The driving scheme is very simple and inexpensive. Dwell Time Control method is used for the minimum switching loss of power device. The switching frequency of power device is less than 4.5kHz at 45,000rpm. By use of this scheme, power device based on very small switching losses can be used on SRM drive. Also, the biggest problem in single phase SRM is starting, this paper shows a new starting algorithm with two hall sensors, accelerating and running sensors, respectively. Finally, the proposed Single Phase SRM achieves higher efficiency and long life time compared to universal motor. Its life time is more than 1500 hours. Its life time is extended 4 times than that of conventional motor and its suction power is increased $20\%$ at the same volume of conventional universal motor.

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

• 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.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers P
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• v.60 no.4
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• pp.172-174
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• 2011

This paper is presented for robot vacuum cleaners using BLDC motors. Recently, BLDC motors which require smaller size, lower sound noise and higher efficiency have been placed in high value-added products including robot vacuum cleaners, vehicle cars and other industry applications. The DC motors have higher sound noise, higher height of the size and lower efficiency due to electro-magnetic structure using the brushes and the commutators. The proposed BLDC motors are appropriate for the motors adequate in regards to higher efficiency, longer life cycle time, and smaller height of the size when robot vacuum cleaners go to some lower height of the space like under sleeping beds and because it's power source is batteries. The paper shows the performance of the BLDC motors designed by the Finite Element Analysis(FEA) of the electro-magnetic field. This paper shows the mechanical structure and the prototype of the motor with the impeller. The performance characteristics of the BLDC motors with the hall sensor controller are verified by the experimental results.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.237-243
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• 2002

The single phase angle control system may become noisy when speed Is modulated with a conventional TRIAC AC controller. But this system is widely used despise of occurring sub-harmonic current because of its simply structure and low cost. Most of the vacuum cleaner drive control system regulates TRIAC's phase angle, so that it is controlled the speed. In the case of marketing product, it is not considered linearity of the speed to minimize occurring harmonic current. The sub-harmonic current reduces effectively in regulating specification TRIAC trigger phase angle. In this paper, we examined about characteristics of phase angle controller and parameter of parallel coil for eliminating sub-harmonic current.

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

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.597-598
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• 2007

• Clean Technology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.283-289
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• 2014

General household vacuum cleaners consist of dust collector, pre filter, motor and exhaust filter, and the filtered clean air is discharged to the atmosphere. By using the CFD methods, we estimated the internal flow in two types of commercial cyclone vacuum cleaners to evaluate the dust collection performance. From the analysis, it was known that the number of revolution had higher values in cyclone cone region. CFD analysis in a specific showed non-uniform velocity distribution at outlet, which results in the deterioration of particle collection performance. In order to improve flow condition, the installation of baffle was proposed and the values of velocity RMS were estimated.