Turbine Tesla - simple and beautiful solution of the technical problem

Nikola Tesla was such a great scientist that the real scope of his discoveries for mankind has yet to be truly appreciated. Most of his inventions, which are still legendary, relates to the possibility of transmitting electrical energy over a distance. However, among patents, and there are far more than a thousand that this eminent theoretician and experimenter-practitioner has received, there are others concerning purely mechanical machine components. One of them describes the principle of operation of an unusual design that converts the energy of the gas flow into rotary motion. Turbine Tesla - this is the name of this mechanism.

Each invention must be unique, such are the modern rules for patent registration, such were they in 1913, when the great scientist received another author's certificate. The originality of Tesla's invention consists in the absence of blades, which are equipped with a rotor of almost any turbine. The transfer of the kinetic energy of the air flow, or any other gas, is not due to direct pressure on the blades placed at an angle to it, but by the motion of the boundary flow of the medium surrounding the completely flat discs. The Tesla turbine uses the same property of gases as their viscosity.

All the inventions of this extraordinary man are very beautiful. The Tesla turbine is no exception. Its beauty is in simplicity, not in primitiveness, but in that subtle conciseness that has become the genius's handwriting. No one before had the idea to spin a disk with a gas stream directed in the same plane with it.

Of course, to increase the efficiency of the whole device, it was necessary to increase the number of disks and minimize the distance between them, so the Tesla turbine is a rotor fixed to the drive shaft, consisting of many flat "plates", and the stator is the space in which this shaft with nozzles rotates , Directed tangentially, that is, perpendicular to the radius of the rotor disks. This design gives a huge advantage in the event that it is necessary to change the direction of rotation. To do this, simply switch the inlet pipe to the nozzle that was previously output, and the entire turbine starts to rotate in the reverse direction.

Another advantage - in the nature of the gas flow, it is laminar, that is, there are no vortex flows in it, overcoming which consumes useful energy, and with which the designers of turbines struggle so hard. In general, at a time when Tesla invented his turbine, the engineers had a lot of problems with the materials for making blades, so he figured out how to do without them at all.

There are design and disadvantages. These include the low gas flow rate at which the Tesla turbine is effective. However, this does not detract from the significance of this invention, which can suddenly be needed and become simply an indispensable solution to the technical problem, as was the case with other patents of N. Tesla.

The simplicity of the design is the obvious quality that the Tesla turbine has. You can make it with your own hands, however, for this you still need considerable qualifications and high accuracy of all the works. After all, the quality of the discs and the small gap between them, which should be very even, as well as the casing with the nozzles with the help of the simplest tools, is almost impossible to perform.