Tesla turbine


The Tesla turbine is a bladeless centripetal flow turbine patented by Nikola Tesla in 1913. It is referred to as a bladeless turbine. The Tesla turbine is also known as the boundary-layer turbine, cohesion-type turbine, and Prandtl-layer turbine because it uses the boundary-layer effect and not a fluid impinging upon the blades as in a conventional turbine. Bioengineering researchers have referred to it as a multiple-disk centrifugal pump. One of Tesla's desires for implementation of this turbine was for geothermal power, which was described in Our Future Motive Power.

Description

The guiding idea for developing Tesla turbine is the fact that in order to attain the highest efficiency, the changes in the velocity and direction of movement of fluid should be as gradual as possible. Therefore, the propelling fluid of Tesla turbine moves in natural paths or stream lines of least resistance.
A Tesla turbine consists of a set of smooth disks, with nozzles applying a moving fluid to the edge of the disk. The fluid drags on the disk by means of viscosity and the adhesion of the surface layer of the fluid. As the fluid slows and adds energy to the disks, it spirals into the center exhaust. Since the rotor has no projections, it is very sturdy.
Tesla wrote: "This turbine is an efficient self-starting prime mover which may be operated as a steam or mixed fluid turbine at will, without changes in construction and is on this account very convenient. Minor departures from the turbine, as may be dictated by the circumstances in each case, will obviously suggest themselves but if it is carried out on these general lines it will be found highly profitable to the owners of the steam plant while permitting the use of their old installation. However, the best economic results in the development of power from steam by the Tesla turbine will be obtained in plants especially adapted for the purpose."

Pump

The device can function as a pump if a similar set of disks and a housing with an involute shape are used. In this configuration a motor is attached to the shaft. The fluid enters near the center, is given energy by the disks, then exits at the periphery. The Tesla turbine does not use friction in the conventional sense; precisely, it avoids it and uses adhesion and viscosity instead. It uses the boundary-layer effect on the disc blades.
Smooth rotor disks were originally proposed, but these gave poor starting torque. Tesla subsequently discovered that smooth rotor disks with small washers bridging the disks in ~12–24 places around the perimeter of a 10″ disk and a second ring of 6–12 washers at a sub-diameter made for a significant improvement in starting torque without compromising efficiency.

Applications

Tesla's patents state that the device was intended for the use of fluids as motive agents, as distinguished from the application of the same for the propulsion or compression of fluids. As of 2016, the Tesla turbine has not seen widespread commercial use since its invention. The Tesla pump, however, has been commercially available since 1982 and is used to pump fluids that are abrasive, viscous, shear sensitive, contain solids, or are otherwise difficult to handle with other pumps. Tesla himself did not procure a large contract for production. The main drawback in his time, as mentioned, was the poor knowledge of materials characteristics and behaviors at high temperatures. The best metallurgy of the day could not prevent the turbine disks from moving and warping unacceptably during operation.
Today, many amateur experiments in the field have been conducted using Tesla turbines which use compressed air, or steam as its power source. The issue of the warping of the discs has been partially solved using new materials such as carbon fiber.
One proposed current application for the device is a waste pump, in factories and mills where normal vane-type turbine pumps typically get blocked.
Applications of the Tesla turbine as a multiple-disk centrifugal blood pump have yielded promising results due to the low peak shear force.
Biomedical engineering research on such applications has been continued into the 21st century.
In 2010, was issued to Howard Fuller for a wind turbine based on the Tesla design.

Efficiency and calculations

In Tesla's time, the efficiency of conventional turbines was low because turbines used a direct drive system that severely limited the potential speed of a turbine to whatever it was driving. At the time of introduction, modern ship turbines were massive and included dozens, or even hundreds of stages of turbines, yet produced extremely low efficiency due to their low speed. For example, the turbine on the Titanic weighed over 400 tons, ran at just 165rpm, and used steam at a pressure of only 6 PSI. This limited it to harvesting waste steam from the main power plants, a pair of reciprocating steam engines. The Tesla turbine also had the ability to run on higher temperature gasses than bladed turbines of the time contributed to its greater efficiency. Eventually axial turbines were given gearing to allow them to operate at higher speeds, but efficiency of axial turbines remained very low in comparison to the Tesla Turbine.
As time went on, competing Axial turbines became dramatically more efficient and powerful, a second stage of reduction gears was introduced in most cutting edge U.S. naval ships of the 1930s. The improvement in steam technology gave the U.S. Navy aircraft carriers a clear advantage in speed over both Allied and enemy aircraft carriers, and so the proven axial steam turbines became the preferred form of propulsion until the 1973 oil embargo took place. The oil crisis drove the majority of new civilian vessels to turn to diesel engines. Axial steam turbines still had not exceeded 50% efficiency by that time, and so civilian ships chose to utilize diesel engines due to their superior efficiency. By this time, the comparably efficient Tesla turbine was over 60 years old.
Tesla's design attempted to sidestep the key drawbacks of the bladed axial turbines, and even the lowest estimates for efficiency still dramatically outperformed the efficiency of axial steam turbines of the day. However, in testing against more modern engines, the Tesla Turbine had expansion efficiencies far below contemporary steam turbines and far below contemporary reciprocating steam engines. It does suffer from other problems such as shear losses and flow restrictions, but this is partially offset by the relatively massive reduction in weight and volume. Some of Tesla turbine's advantages lie in relatively low flow rate applications or when small applications are called for. The disks need to be as thin as possible at the edges in order not to introduce turbulence as the fluid leaves the disks. This translates to needing to increase the number of disks as the flow rate increases. Maximum efficiency comes in this system when the inter-disk spacing approximates the thickness of the boundary layer, and since boundary layer thickness is dependent on viscosity and pressure, the claim that a single design can be used efficiently for a variety of fuels and fluids is incorrect. A Tesla turbine differs from a conventional turbine only in the mechanism used for transferring energy to the shaft. Various analyses demonstrate the flow rate between the disks must be kept relatively low to maintain efficiency. Reportedly, the efficiency of the Tesla turbine drops with increased load. Under light load, the spiral taken by the fluid moving from the intake to the exhaust is a tight spiral, undergoing many rotations. Under load, the number of rotations drops and the spiral becomes progressively shorter. This will increase the shear losses and also reduce the efficiency because the gas is in contact with the discs for less distance.
Efficiency is a function of power output. A moderate load makes for high efficiency. Too heavy a load increases the slip in the turbine and lowers the efficiency; with too light a load, little power is delivered to the output, which also decreases efficiency. This behavior is not exclusive to Tesla turbines.
The turbine efficiency of the gas Tesla turbine is estimated to be above 60, reaching a maximum of 95 percent. Keep in mind that turbine efficiency is different from the cycle efficiency of the engine using the turbine. Axial turbines which operate today in steam plants or jet engines have efficiencies of over 90%. This is different from the cycle efficiencies of the plant or engine which are between approximately 25% and 42%, and are limited by any irreversibilities to be below the Carnot cycle efficiency. Tesla claimed that a steam version of his device would achieve around 95 percent efficiency. Actual tests of a Tesla steam turbine at the Westinghouse works showed a steam rate of 38 pounds per horsepower-hour, corresponding to a turbine efficiency in the range of 90%, while contemporary steam turbines could often achieve turbine efficiencies of well over 50%. The thermodynamic efficiency is a measure of how well it performs compared to an isentropic case. It is the ratio of the ideal to the actual work input/output. Turbine efficiency is defined as the ratio of the ideal change in enthalpy to the real enthalpy for the same change in pressure.
In the 1950s, Warren Rice attempted to re-create Tesla's experiments, but he did not perform these early tests on a pump built strictly in line with the Tesla's patented design. Rice's experimental single stage system's working fluid was air. Rice's test turbines, as published in early reports, produced an overall measured efficiency of 36–41% for a single stage. Higher efficiency would be expected if designed as originally proposed by Tesla.
In his final work with the Tesla turbine and published just prior to his retirement, Rice conducted a bulk-parameter analysis of model laminar flow in multiple disk turbines. A very high claim for rotor efficiency for this design was published in 1991 titled "Tesla Turbomachinery". This paper states:
Modern multiple stage bladed turbines typically reach 60–70% efficiency, while large steam turbines often show turbine efficiency of over 90% in practice. Volute rotor matched Tesla-type machines of reasonable size with common fluids would also be expected to show efficiencies in the vicinity of 60–70% and possibly higher.

A simple Thermo/Fluid-Dynamics model for Tesla Turbine

Let now investigate the Tesla Turbine, and shortly technically every Blade Steam Turbine first, in respect to the Newton's 3 Law of Motion.
In standard BST the steam has to press on the blades in order for the rotor to extract energy from the steam speed, due to the difference between the relative speed of the steam and the blades. In BST the blades must be carefully orientated, in the optimal regime of the regime's work, in such a way as to minimize the angle of the steam attack to their surface area. Or in their words, they are trying to minimize the angle with which the steam is hitting their surface area, as to create smooth seam flow, without any so called “eddies” or turbulence. Exactly these eddies are created according to the N3LM, or in reaction to the steam impacting the surface of the blades. One these eddies are loss to the useful energy that can be extracted from the system and second, as they are in opposite direction, they decrease the energy of the incoming steam stream.
In TT, considering that there are no blades to be impacted what is the mechanism of this energy of reaction to materialize. The recreational force to the steam head pressure actually builds, relatively quickly, as a steam pressure “belt” along the periphery of the turbine. That belt is most dense, pressurized, in the periphery as it pressure, when the rotor is not under load, will be a notch less, then the steam pressure. In a normal operational mode, that peripheral pressure, as Tesla noted, plays a role of BEMF, limiting the flow of the incoming stream, and in this way the TT can be said to be self regulating. When the rotor is not under load the relative speeds between the "steam compressed spirals" and the disks is minimal.
When a load is applied on the TT shaft the slows down, i.e. the relative speed of the discs to the fluid increases as the fluid, at least initially, preserves its own momentum. For example, we can take a radius where at 9000 RPM the peripheral disk speeds are, when there is no load on the rotor, the disks move at approximately the same speed with the fluid, but when the rotor is loaded, the relative velocity differential increases and rotor speed has a relative speed of 45 m/s to the SCS. This is a dynamic environment and these speeds reach these values over time delta and not instantly. Here we have to note that fluids start to behave like solid bodies at high relative velocities, and in TT case, we also have to take in consideration the additional pressure. According to the old literature on steam boilers it is said, that steam at high speed, resulting from high pressure source, cuts steel as a "knife cuts butter". According to the logic, this pressure and relative velocity towards the faces of the discs, the steam should start behaving like a solid body dragging on disk metal surfaces. The created “friction” can only lead to the generation of an additional heat directly on the disk and in SCS, and will be most pronounced in the peripheral layer, where the relative velocity between the metal discs and SCS discs is the highest. This increase in the temperature, will be translated to increase in the SCS temperature, and that will lead to SCS steam expansion and pressure increase perpendicular to the metal discs as well as radially on the axis of rotation, and so this dynamics appears to be a positive feedback for transmitting a stronger “dragging” on the metal disks and consequently increasing the torque at the axis of rotation.
This dynamics appears to be a derivative of what Tesla commented, and although it is not mentioned by him, it is a logical next step to explain the thermodynamics in the system.

Books and publications

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