Will a vacuum cleaner work in outer space?
If by "outer space" you mean out in the vacuum of space, then no it will not work. A vacuum cleaner works by creating a powerful flow in an ambient fluid. Particles of dirt get caught up in the flow in a process called "entrainment." Farther downstream, a filter or a cyclone separates the entrained material from the fluid flow. Where there is no ambient fluid, a traditional vacuum cleaner won't work as a cleaning device. What will happen is that the impeller (the object spun by the motor to create the fluid flow) will spin very rapidly because there's no fluid (air) to slow it down. The traditional lubricants will quickly evaporate, leaving metal-to-metal contact in the moving parts. This will cause them to vacuum-weld together and seize. The wire coils that convert electrical power to magnetic force in the motor will continue to heat up as they offer resistance to the electrical flow. Normally the air flow cools the motor, but that does not occur in space. Therefore the motor elements will heat up to the point where they lose mechanical strength. The bearings will fail. Hence the motor-impeller assembly will likely fail mechanically in some way within a short time. Depending on the strength of the plastic housing, the fractures may be contained. If not, there will be a series of projectiles flung from the failed assembly and may damage adjacent equipment or injure nearby crew.
What would happen if you turned on a vacuum cleaner in space?
Let's think about how a vacuum cleaner works. It has a canister, behind which there is a motor and a fan. The fan blades are tilted so that air is forced through the hose and the canister, through the porous bag, and out the 'back' of the vacuum cleaner. Without this airflow, the vacuum cleaner will not suck! If you were to turn it on in space, there would be no airflow, so the dumb thing wouldn't suck, and you would be stuck with a dirty carpet floating in interplanetary space! Now, because the fan blade is attached to the shaft of a motor, and because the shaft turns around in a ball bearing raceway, there is friction between the spinning shaft and the casing of the motor which is attached to the vacuum cleaner. This friction causes some of the momentum of the shaft and the blade to be transferred to the casing of the motor. On the ground, this has no noticeable effect, but in space, with the vacuum cleaner not attached to a large mass, an interesting thing will happen. When the vacuum cleaner is turned on, the spinning shaft will eventually cause the vacuum cleaner to begin spinning in the opposite direction from the shaft, because the shaft pushes against the bearing causing it to want to move in the opposite direction as the shaft. At first this happens slowly, then at increasing rpms until an equilibrium is reached where the shaft and the vacuum cleaner are spinning at rates that cause their angular momenta to be equal and opposite. The vacuum cleaner will not spin at the same rpms as the shaft because the vacuum cleaner is more massive, and the friction between the shaft and the vacuum dictates how much angular momentum gets transferred between the axle and the vacuum cleaner. make a black hole wtf? nice one! lmfao lmfao rofl lol
To expand on Stuart Hardwick’s answer, a vacuum would react very differently in space, depending on how the motor is designed.The underlying problem is that the vacuum won’t have very much load on it, because there’s no air for it to pull against.If the fan is driven by a “brushless DC motor” - which is a common design in today’s electronics - then it’s actually an AC motor that’s driven by some solid-state electronics that generate either a true AC signal or some type of square wave.What that means is that there’s a software-controlled speed that the motor rotates at. It’ll generate heat as it accelerates, but once it’s up to speed it won’t actually be generating much heat at all. It’s pretty hard to say how quickly the thing would burn out, but it would probably be pretty slow and pretty lame.But, if the fan is driven by a “brushed DC motor” then the situation gets a lot more exciting. Instead of having a software-controlled signal, there are mechanical contacts that rotate with the motor to alternate the current in the windings.In that case, the motor has no real set rotation speed - it’s limited by a combination of the electromagnetic interaction and whatever the load is. Since there’s a lot less load on the motor now that it’s in a vacuum, when you turn it on, the vacuum will just accelerate wildly until either something overheats in the electronics, it blows out a bearing, or it’s moving so quickly that the coil no longer energizes in time to accelerate it. If it does manage to accelerate to top speed, it’ll most likely vibrate like crazy and then blow a bearing.Either way, it would be pretty exciting.
The 'vacuum' in vacuum cleaner is a grossly over estimated description. Your friendly neighborhood vacuum cleaner will create a pressure difference only about 20% of the atmospheric pressure, while your advanced artificial ultra high vacuum system (like the ones that fabricate nano devices and your computer chips) operates at around 10^-11 times the atmospheric pressure. (If only the 18 year old me new this! but I digress). That's not 100% vacuum but nearly there with such low pressure gas. I don't know about deep space, but the atmosphere above the karman line (the boundary of space) exists with even lower pressures. If you run your vacuum cleaner in the exosphere or in deep space, it will be nothing more than a running table fan in the cosmos. It does nothing except entertain little green creatures in saucers who happen to pass by.
First of all, you need to understand that what is vacuum. In most simple and innocent terms, vacuum is lack of atoms in a particular volume.Now, this is again a relative term. When you say no vacuum, you assume that if there is no air, there is vacuum. But if you broaden your horizon, and think relatively at atomic level, say, you think of every molecule of air as some planetary object, there is vacuum in between air molecules. Similarly, going so large that planets seems like a molecule, there is no vacuum in space as well. Space has all the planets, stars and galaxy.Though I haven't answered your question but now you have been educated enough to think an answer for yourself.
What would happen if you vacuumed a vacuum cleaner?
they would implode from all the suction
Vaccum cleaner in space?
Vacuum cleaners (and suction cups) cannot work in a vacuum. In physics I learned that vacuum cleaners do not suck. They use a pump to push the air inside the cleaner out a vent on the back, and that reduces the pressure inside the cleaner to some value less than outside air pressure, but still more than zero absolute pressure. Then the higher pressure air outside the cleaner pushes it's way into the cleaner through another opening in the front of the cleaner. If you cover this opening with your hand, the "suction" you feel is really outside air pushing the other side of your hand into the opening. There is no force pulling on your hand. In other words, the pressure inside the cleaner is not negative. Negative absolute pressure is physically impossible.
Would a vacuum cleaner work in space?
I think there's enough negative pressure operating up there already
Does a vacuum cleaner work in space?
Nope, cause you cant plug it in to anything!! x3 In all seriousness, space itself is already a vacuum, so no, a regulare household vacuum wont work in space. Unless its in the shuttle or something?? It has to be able to suck air. There is no air in space.
“What is the ‘vacuum’ of outer space?”A pure vacuum is a space void of matter. The word stems from the Latin adjective vacuus for "vacant" or "void." An approximation of a vacuum is a region with a gaseous pressure much less than atmospheric pressure. But that doesn’t mean that “space” is completely empty. There is a very disperse gaseous level. Not only that, such a “space” may be filled by dark matter, since dark matter is detected by how it reacts to gravity, and there is a lot of it. Dark matter is an undescribed type of matter comprising approximately 27% of the mass and energy in the observable universe that is not accounted for by dark energy, baryonic matter (ordinary matter), and neutrinos.But since we can’t see it, touch it, or even easily measure it except by it’s affect by gravity, it doesn’t change our concept of a vacuum, which only refers to ordinary matter.Dark matter | CERN