Yukiji Iwase

Development of a Household Vacuum Cleaner With a New Cyclone Dust Collector

A household vacuum cleaner named “Tatsumaki cyclone” with a new cyclone dust collector was developed. It has a unique horizontal layout called the inverted cyclone layout that features a dust bunker adjacent to a cyclone cylinder with an up-draught airflow. It also has a new airflow arrangement called triple-suction airflow that separates airflow after removing dust at the cyclone cylinder. The main suction airflow is exhausted from the main port (which is downstream of the cyclone cylinder) through an inner cylinder. The sub-suction airflow is exhausted from the dust bunker after it heavily compresses the dust (sub port). The center suction airflow is exhausted from the center port. In this study, we used the Cartesian grid system to simulate the flow field inside the dust collector. This system uses only rectangular parallelepiped meshes; profiles of the dust collector were represented by stepped surfaces of cubic meshes. Each mesh was generated based on whether it was inside or outside the solid body of the dust collector. High-performance computers have recently been used to help generate super-fine meshes that fit closely the smooth shape of a dust collector. The Cartesian grid system has the advantage of being able to quickly generate square-meshes of complex shape that can be converted directly from the CAD data. We simulated the velocity distribution of single-suction, twin-suction and triple-suction models. The single-suction model had only a main port to exhaust airflow, the twin-suction model had a main port, and a sub port, and the triple-suction model had a main port, a sub port, and a center port. In this study, a Cartesian grid system with a finite difference method was used to correct the unsteady three-dimensional flows. After the simulation, we experimented with pressure losses and measured change in air quantity by the dust load of each model. These steps enabled us to develop a new cyclone dust collector called Tatsumaki cyclone as part of a compact household vacuum cleaner with lower pressure loss and a larger capacity dust bunker.© 2007 ASME