The suction head is a component positioned at the vacuum cleaner's tip and used to control airflow to eliminate small particles, thus preventing contamination from occurring during the cleaning process at a hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturing factory. At the factory, 2 suction head types (bowl and straight) were used in the cleaning process. From an actual usage, the operators questioned the operating condition's performance and suitability. In order to seek an answer to the questions, the researchers used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate airflow and particle trace using the ANSYS Fluent software, the factory's actual conditions, and a suction distance ranging between 2.5-15 mm. CFD simulation results showed that the bowl type suction head performed better compared to the straight type in every suction range under the exact same operating conditions. Both suction heads performed well at a 5 mm distance between the suction head and cleaning area. Suction performance decreased when the head was positioned closer or farther than the mentioned distance. Apart from applying all results from this research to increase cleaning efficiency in the actual factory, the findings could also be used as basic information for designing new suction head models with higher efficiency than the original model.

The previous shape of the suction head (SH) employed in a cleaning process in a factory had a low performance, removed fewer particles, and generated an annoying noise. Therefore, new shapes of SH have been proposed to solve the issues and the cleaning performance was investigated by the Shear Stress Transport (SST) k-ω turbulence, Discrete Phase (DP), Large Eddy Simulation (LES), and Ffowcs Williams and Hawkings (FW–H) models in a transient state of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The SST k-ω and DP models were applied to determine the airflow, suspension velocity, cleaning region, and particle trace. In addition, the LES and FW–H models were used to evaluate the noise, sound pressure level, and frequency generated from the proposed shapes. All simulation results were validated with the air velocity and noise measurements and were analyzed to find a suitable shape. The simulation and experimental results revealed that the shapes of the SH affected the cleaning performance and noise generation. The higher the air velocity, the higher the noise generation. The suitable shape delivered a 4.37% better particle removing performance and 11.1 dB less noise generation than the previous shape. The outcomes of this research are the suitable shape of the SH and the research methodology which enabled the application of both CFD and experiments to solve the issue to help enhance the efficiency of the cleaning process in an actual factory.