Friday, March 30, 2012

How Vacuum Cleaners Work

Your vacuum cleaner really is a fairly easy machine to understand. Much of the room is taken up with the bag, which is the first part of the vacuum. The bag is porous and holds the dirt and grime that the vacuum cleaner sucks up from your carpeting. The other simple piece of equipment to understand is the outside housing unit in vacuum cleaner-speak. For most users, it’s the spot where they keep the brushes and extra hoses.
A fan and motor power your vacuum cleaner. The part on the bottom of the vacuum cleaner where you can feel air being sucked in is called the intake valve. The fan and motor come between it and the outtake valve. When you switch on your vacuum cleaner, the fan comes on. The motor is the engine of the vacuum cleaner and actually is small, despite the noise of the vacuum. The noise comes from the fan humming. Unlike a house fan, the vacuum fan has blades that work like a propeller. They are angled which permits them to force the air upward.
The angled blades make the air in front of the fan denser than the air above the fan. That means that the fan then has the power to push the lighter air upward. The fan shoves this air up and into the outtake valve. That valve leads to the bag, where dirt is captured. The remaining air leaves the vacuum cleaner.
The vacuum cleaner works on a physics concept similar to the way a tornado works. If someone is in the eye of a tornado, it is calm. The problem is on the outer edges, where air is being tossed about at different densities. The same applies for the vacuum. Inside the vacuum at the point of the fan is fairly calm, but the fan works furiously to move the air around and “stir up” the dirt.
The vacuum cleaner works on the basis of air pressure. The pressure outside the vacuum remains higher than the pressure inside it, which is what permits the vacuum to suck air into the machine. Vacuuming up pennies and other pieces of metal or larger objects can cause a serious problem with your vacuum. These objects can get stuck in the intake valve or the hoses. Then the vacuum cleaner will not be able to sustain the same level of air pressure, which means that it will not clean as well.
The bristles on the bottom of the intake valve affect this phenomenon as well. If you catch carpeting in these bristles, they will not move as quickly, which means that they will not suck air into the vacuum as quickly. That can cause the vacuum cleaner not to work well. The vacuum cleaner at its core is a very easy to understand machine. Air pressure guides the way that it works, so if you have a problem with your vacuum, checking the ability of the air to flow smoothly is your best bet for finding a solution to the problem.

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