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Key Parts of a Vacuum Cleaner
Since the first Vacuum Cleaner design over 150 years ago the design has become ever more complex but has still retained an element of simplicity.
The key parts of a Vacuum Cleaner are:
- Inlet
- Filtration
- Storage
- Suction
These main areas are highly abstracted, in a modern Vacuum Cleaner they are:
- Hose and tools / Brush bar
- Filter Bag / Air/HEPA Filter / Cyclone
- Bin / Bag
- Motor
The inlet to a vacuum cleaner can significantly affect the efficiency of the vacuum cleaners dust collection, typically almost every vacuum cleaner sold today comes with a range of tools including:
- Floor Tool
- Stair Tool
- Crevice Tool
- Dusting Brush
These tools typically designed to fit to a 32mm diameter for consumer products and a 38mm diameter for commercial products. Typically these tools can be attached directly to the end of a vacuum hose or using some extension tubes to allow the user to stand whilst vacuuming.
Many older vacuum cleaners used to have a paper bag that acted as a filter catching all the dirt making it easy to simply remove the bad and dispose of it. The bag would have microscopic holes in the wall that would allow air to flow through but not the majority of the dust and dirt.
Today most vacuum cleaners are bag-less, cheaper models trying to emulate the cyclone separation models have a plastic storage bin with a filter to prevent the particles getting through the motor, while more expensive models use cyclonic separation. There are more details about this in the next section.
The storage container need only be air tight and easy to remove, some types of filtration are integrated into the dirt storage, like with the filter bags.
Arguably the main element of any vacuum cleaner is the suction source, in the past this would have been human powered bellows or turbines, however today it is an electric powered motor. The typical motor spins around 30,000rpm although newer Dyson motors spin up to over 100,000rpm. In all cases this is by far the fastest spinning device in any home:
- 20x more than a car
- 10x more than a washing machine