Tesla Turbine | The interesting physics behind it

Man really said "I'm limited by the technology of my time"

I was part of team that built one of these for an Airforce design competition in college. We could reliably get ~94% efficiency with a closed loop superheated steam system harvesting exhaust heat from a small jet engine and got just below 96% efficiency in some ideal test cases. The main limiting factors were that the discs had to be designed to stretch uniformly without distorting at ~40k RPM and that the gaps between the disks had to be designed for an incredibly specific set of operating parameters (steam temp, pressure, velocity, etc.). The smallest variations, or while waiting for it to spin up, and we wouldn't even get close to those efficiencies. A lot of the initial designs weren't efficient enough to reach the right parameters at all.

This animation and explanation really deserves a lot of credit.... this is really good stuff, well done!

Being a civil engineer who has studied fluid mechanics for 3 semester I am totally flabbergatsed by Tesla. This is mind blowing..

Tesla's genius was finding solutions to problems. By doing so, he also created a few problems which, therefore, made him even more inventive.

Edison after seeing this: Edison's turbine

He created something so powerful and effective that it was too much for the materials he was using. Nikola Tesla may have had OCD, but he was the Chad of engineering.

I was a new graduate electrical engineer at Allis-Chalmers Corp. at the research division in West Allis, WI in 1961. At that time, A-C owned the Tesla turbine patent, and I worked beside a fellow mechanical engineer who had been assigned the task of running tests on a compressed air driven Tesla turbine. To load the turbine, a war surplus B-29 engine turbocharger [A-C had made these during WWII, and a few were still lying around] was shaft driven by the test Tesla turbine. A-C was one of the USA manufacturers of steam turbines at that time, and therefore the performance of the Tesla turbine was of interest. After the tests, a full report was written, but is probably lost today, as A-C went out of business in 1986. I am happy to see that others have pursued testing of the Tesla turbine, and have added to the knowledge base. As an interesting side note, Nicola Tesla himself was hired by A-C as an engineering consultant in the early 20th century as revealed in a report on file that my fellow engineer found in the A-C archive. As is well known, Tesla was rather eccentric in his habits. He could not stand to stay overnight in West Allis for some reason, spending his nights out in suburban Waukesha, and commuting by electric rail each workday to the West Allis works. That report too is probably lost.

the simplicity of the design just makes it cooler

idk why this was recommended to me, but this is quite interesting.

Its wild knowing he sometimes had trouble distinguishing reality from the thoughts in his own head. He was basically a genius who was hallucinating in his everyday life

The video animation designs produced are just superb. Thanks to the Lesics team.

Tesla was a genius! Not because his inventions were something that no one could make, but exactly because they were very easy to make if you knew which scientific principal i can be applied to which part of an invention. I think that's what makes him a genius.

Some concrete pumps use Tesla discs because they can flow chunky materials, as long as a certain size of grain is not exceeded.

The basic principle for the Tesla Turbine is well presented, but there are considerable number of secondary, as the speed ratio between the steam and the disks, and tertiary dynamics such as the turbulence in the boundary layer (which is the transfer energy vector ) when the relative speed between the fluid and the disk is changing are not noted at all, and these by themselves affect hugely the efficiency of the turbine. Also note these "bumps" in the shaft, these are fluid bearings (!!!). For those interested more, highly recommending "A new dimension for Power" book that represents some research and most of Tesla documented notes on the turbine.

I think Tesla's idea was that given sufficient materials capable of taking such forces it could achieve 97% efficiency.

Finally someone fully explained why we don't use Tesla turbines in powerhouses. I work on steam turbines in the powerhouses during shutdowns. Most of the engineers I have talked with didn't even know what a Tesla turbine was, let alone why we didn't use them.

“Engineering impossibility” is another way to say “we haven’t figured it out yet”

a source of energy - they are warm air, which is transformed into rotational motion in a concentric vortex. The basis is a disk that rotates between the covers, creating a large vacuum in the center. There is a hole in the top cover (it is also in the center of the disk to use both sides of the disk) above the hole there is a dome, in the dome on the edges there are holes through which warm air enters. A vortex is formed in the dome, which rotates a small (compared to the disk) turbine - the turbine is attached in the center of the disk. The drop in temperature is so severe that the bearings freeze (which is a big problem). When accelerating, there will be a howling loud sound, you need to accelerate even more to pass this threshold, then the vortex will push the turbine and the disk itself. This is a source of energy. Thank you...

viscocity is beautifully described with the interesting animation... great and great...i am a fan of this team!...i feel sometimes, we missed such teaching aids to understand the concepts of physics... when i was studying engineering... may be we would have understood much better...however no regrets!