DIY 3D Printed Vacuum Impellers

this video is sponsored by squarespace a few months ago when i was working on my 3d printed cyclone separators i thought it might be fun to also try 3d printing vacuum impeller turbines to potentially replace my shopvac for cnc dust collection i ended up designing three different impellers to try out the first was a turbo style impeller where the air gets sucked in through the top and then centrifugal force causes it to get flung outward through the holes in the sides this design is more similar to the turbocharger in a race car or a model jet engine normally they are used to compress air but i'm kind of doing the opposite i'm using it to pull a vacuum the next design is a fancy axial edf type impeller that uses 12 layers of opposing blades this is more similar to a large jet engine like those found in a fighter jet now this has stator blades and rotor blades the stator blades are fixed and the rotor blades spin so if you look at their movement relative to each other they are counter-rotating having 12 layers of opposing blades will hopefully give us a pretty decent vacuum the final design is a little bit more like a traditional vacuum cleaner it's basically just a big paddle wheel in a snail-shaped housing and due to centrifugal force it flings the air outwards so now that we have our designs let's get printing up first came the turbo fan for all three designs i'm using a 400 kv heavy lift drone motor this should give us enough torque to spin the larger impellers but hopefully not enough rpm to blow them up because after all they are just 3d printed pla so the motor and the impeller got screwed onto the base housing part and then the intake shroud gets pressed on over that after running it up it was clear that there was some rubbing going on and this caused it to explode when i spun it up even faster ah it blew up so then i printed a new impeller with slightly looser tolerances and it still rubbed but not enough to blow up my solution to this problem was just to run it for a long time and let it sand itself down this thing was very noisy way too noisy to be a shop vac replacement candidate just for fun i also 3d printed a compressor housing for this turbo impeller and compress it did they air coming out the nozzle was quite high in velocity [Applause] in this footage shot on the freefly wave high speed camera we can see that the compression ratio is probably too high with this design because a lot of the smoke is getting deflected out of the intake instead of getting sucked through this is probably bad for the volume of air it can move but good for velocity and pressure okay so what's your theory all right my theory is that if you block off the vacuum like this so you're pulling it in a vacuum there's gonna be less air for the the impeller to be working against so it'll it'll actually be spinning faster and it'll pull less current when you're like you know when you get to a vacuum spot it goes yeah that's just spinning up so you think it speeds up when you when you block it yeah i think we're going to pull less i think maybe i don't know everybody that's my guess let's try it okay wow release yeah wow you're right but it seems like it's working harder you know like intuitively because you're like you're sucking in all this stuff you're just blocking it but it's actually working less hard interesting speeds up ethan had a cold while we were doing this and i'm pretty sure this is how i caught it maximum virus aerosolization with a turbofan is generally not a good practice for preventing viral spread so if i sounded a bit nasally in my cyclone video that's why it's a way to dry out your mouth that's for sure yeah it really does that's amazing moving on to the axial fan this one was a lot more tricky to print because all the blades were overhanging so i had to use a lot more support material this generally leads to poor quality surfaces which are not good for aerodynamics but until i get a resin printer that's just the way it is in order to fit the stator rings around the rotor blades i had to cut them and bend them around the rotor the lowest rotor blade section connected to the motor and the motor was connected to the housing and then a stack of three rotor blades went on top of that then i put a steel shaft down the middle and two more layers of rotor blades went on top of that then came the final stator and a bearing in the nose cone that would constrain the rotor from the top and then i screwed all the layers together and spun it up for the first test run i was pleasantly surprised that there wasn't very much rubbing going on inside i guess my tolerances were loose enough but hopefully not too loose to pull a good vacuum next it was time for the centrifugal snail blower i printed the giant base housing all in one part then i installed the motor screwed it in place and put on the impeller also screwed that in place and then installed the top part after spinning it up it seems to blow pretty well but there was a loud cavitation noise that i think was being caused by the blades passing super close to the sharp edge [Music] to try and fix this i melted the sharp plastic edge and bent it over a little bit [Music] success that totally worked and it was a lot quieter this blower ended up being too big for the motor even at low throttle levels it was pulling way more current than the other two designs this is unfortunate because it means we can't really do a fair scientific comparison to see which design type is optimal but oh well since it was over propped the motor was getting very hot this is kind of like trying to accelerate your car from a red light in fifth gear not ideal the axial fan was the opposite its propellers were too small and it was not pulling very much current at all this is just leaving performance on the table but despite these issues i was still able to test them for a back to back comparison to measure the strength of the vacuum i put this two inch tube in a bucket of water and put the vacuums on top of that i would measure the height that the water would get sucked upwards at various amounts of amps the voltage was consistent the whole time so we're basically just looking at power consumption here this is also called a static pressure test since i'm only measuring the vacuum and not the amount of airflow that these fans are able to move that's much harder to measure so i tested all three of the vacuum designs recorded the data and made a graph the turbofan took the lead but i didn't run it past 8 amps because i was afraid it was going to explode you can see that it was starting to lose its advantage at higher current draws and i bet this was because the impeller was stretching and rubbing on the housing more it definitely sounded like this was the case and it was vibrating quite a bit the axial or linear fan actually did much better than i thought it would considering that it was under propped and the blade gaps were pretty large compared to an edf or jet engine so that's cool speaking of edfs i decided to test out a standard 50 millimeter rc jet edf and i was pleased to find that despite the tight blade gaps and smooth surface finish my designs roasted it edfs have quite a low static pressure but it probably would have won the volumetric flow rate competition a few weeks prior i was biking around town and found a dyson handheld vacuum that someone had thrown out i strapped it to my bike took it home and found that the vacuum itself was perfectly good it just needed a new battery oh yeah oh no ah damn no okay it would definitely suck the water all the way up there wow ah now i really want to know how much power this thing is pulling i couldn't find any power draw info anywhere but based on the battery capacity and advertised run time i calculated this thing uses about 460 watts at full chooch i only tested my vacuums up to 240 watts so this isn't a fair comparison but considering that the dyson's impeller is tiny and it was sucking air through a cyclone and filter and it's way quieter the performance is quite impressive that little impeller is insanely well balanced and it spins at insane rpms pretty sweet i would love to build a bigger version of this axial linear fan someday because i think it might actually be a somewhat practical replacement for my shopvac but for now i decided to try this one out with the cyclone to see how it would do for some cnc foam cutting a mighty space to collect the dust with the cyclone makes me wanna see and see all night long going hard when i turn the shop back on and it moves that just like a cyclone just like a cyclone okay sorry that song was just too amazing not to play again but anyways i put a paper towel on top to filter out anything that made it through the cyclone then i started cutting out some wings out of xps foam on the stepcraft m1000 the axial fan actually seemed to work quite well i cut quite a bit of foam and collected quite a bit of dust the downside is that it's even noisier than the shopvac so i probably won't use it in the future the paper towel collected a tiny bit of dust but really not much compared to how much the cyclone separated out now for some screwing around with high speed cameras i really thought this turbo fan would blow up at full throttle but it turns out it didn't it could even handle water being poured in the intake but could it handle a big chunk of plastic no chance [Music] a few weeks ago i posted the snow cat up on rctestflight.com for pre-order the whole batch sold out in less than a week i couldn't believe it you can now pre-order a kit from the second batch but that will likely not ship until late winter or early spring it's definitely a bit intimidating to have all these orders piling up but luckily i'm using squarespace and their ecommerce tools so processing all these orders will be just about as easy as it gets i also used squarespace to build the website and it's definitely my preferred website building platform of choice i've been using squarespace for several years now and i can honestly say it's the best website building tool out there squarespace gives people a powerful and beautiful online platform from which to create their website their powerful ecommerce tools make adding products tracking inventory and managing orders super easy squarespace extensions make it easy for me to connect third party shipping and order fulfillment services to streamline the logistics this is going to be a huge help for the snowgap project let's just hope i can fit all the parts in my house for the people who backed the snowcap project on kickstarter i'll be using the squarespace members area it allows creators to connect with their audience and publish gated members only content they can manage their members send email communications and leverage audience insights all in one easy to use platform for bloggers creating a community on your squarespace website is easy with a fully integrated commenting system that supports threaded comments replies and likes use their powerful blogging tools to categorize share and schedule your posts too automatically push website content to your favorite social media channels so your followers can share it too check out rctestflight.com to see my squarespace website and for your own website go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com rc test flight to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain thanks again to squarespace for sponsoring this video that's it for now thanks for watching bye

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 1,054,058

Keywords: 3D printed, cyclone, EDF, jet engine, jet, fan, impeller, turbo

Id: mafjVYfFgg4

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 08 2022