Fabrication of a Simple and Affordable Vacuum Cleaner

The cleaning of living and work spaces are a fundamental human activity. Cleaning must be done for safety and human health. The process of cleaning can be cumbersome, tasking on the human muscle and time consuming when done in the traditional way of using brooms, brushes and similar tools. Modern living and work requirements demands that cleaning must be done fast and more efficiently. This need therefore demands that the cleaning of living and work spaces has to be mechanized to take away the burden from human muscles, improve efficiency, save time and cost. One way of achieving this is through the use of Vacuum Cleaners. A literature review during the course of this project work revealed that virtually all available Vacuum Cleaners listed and reviewed online as well as those found in shops here in Nigeria are highly technologically sophisticated and unaffordable for homes and small scale firms. The need therefore arises for the production of a locally affordable Vacuum Cleaner made from readily available local materials. The literature review and search identified a simple handheld Vacuum Cleaner that can be modified and adapted through a redesign to use locally available materials for its production. Several concept designs were proposed and the most acceptable in terms of simplicity, availability of local materials and affordability was chosen. The components for the chosen design were redesigned one by one with the idea of local production in mind. These includes the intake Wand and its dust agitator, the housing, the motor and its mounting within the housing, the air stream expansion section of the housing, the dust bag and its attachment to the housing and finally air flow exhaust area. After the design of these components the material needed for their fabrication were procured and the components fabricated. These fabricated components were then assembled to produce the portable Vacuum Cleaner complete with a shoulder hanging belt. The assembled unit was then tested in the 500 level classroom. The performance of the Vacuum Cleaner was found to be really effective in dust pickup through the dust agitator at the end of the end of the wand that is always pressed against the floor as it is pushed back and forth during the cleaning process. No dust particle size in the classroom was left on the floor during the testing. It is worthy of v note that there was a small amount of very very fine particles of dust noticed in the effluent exhaust air. The posibble reasons suggested for this unwanted occurrence by our project group were listed as 1. A larger than required dust bag particle size retention holes that allowed these very fine dust particles to escape with the exhaust air. and or 2. Insufficient expansion of the exhaust air to reduce its speed to allow these very fine particles to deposit in the air stream expansion zone of the Vacuum Cleaner housing. For the fact that the fabricated Vacuum Cleaner was able to pick up virtually all particles on the floor, this project is therefore considered a great success. It is hoped that improvements to this design would continue to be carried out in future project work until it reaches the perfection in both aesthetics and performance for commercialization.