How Fast Can a Tesla Turbine Spin?

Tesla turbines are not used because when we have disks that are rotating very fast, there is a high chance that they tend to warp. This means we need to use special materials, which again increases cost…

The brilliance of Tesla's turbine is he took one of the problems of a conventional turbine, molecular adhesion on the blades, and made it part of the solution. This approach of harnessing the problem directly to the solution was a constant in his designs.

Your correct, everything needs to be tuned properly. That's something I've learned over the years, and I haven't had any issues with warping. My latest turbine uses fiberglass disks, that have an extremely high strength to weight ratio and I don't experience any warping. Also there isn't any issues with torque either. Thanks for making an accurate video about tesla turbines.

Thanks for all your videos. I love how you explain things in a simplistic way.

We do use teslaturbines where ever there is a highly viscous fluid that needs to be driving a turbine! We do this all the time. Would use it for less viscous fluids/gases like water or air IF it would be possible to run big Teslaturbine disks of a few meters in diameter on several 10k or 30k rpm....yet there is no material out there today that can survive these stresses.

Nikola Tesla was ahead of his time... Great man to learn from

The good thing about Tesla turbine is its efficiency is 97% but it has low volume density. Means, at same power load, it requires a huge volume. In industry, a lower efficiency but compact size is preferred.

One of the other things that limits their adoption now is that with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) traditional turbines can be designed to be hyper optimized for their use cases, in some ways taking advantage of the very principles the tesla turbine exclusively operates on. A great example is the modern steam turbines that are installed into thermal power plants. they almost look like a hybrid of the tesla turbine and a standard jet engine compressor.

I would like to add a minor correction , sort of, we do use tesla turbines but as pumps , they are commonly used in industry for fluid pumps of volatile fluids like oil. great video overall though.

In the wine industry, I was amazed to see a Tesla turbine used as a wine pump. This was in 2008 at Frey Winery (Redwood Valley, California.) The Frey family are MIT level geniuses who are happy just making wine. They were using Tesla turbines as reversible wine pumps long before the Internet got fascinated with them -- and have been using the design in a practical manner for decades.

In the explanation you missed one of the coolest aspects of the Tesla turbine. He uses the principle of conservation of angular momentum and it kind of self induction Loop a bit the way Tesla coil uses the voltage gain earlier in the coil to create a step up later in the coil which creates a voltage draw that increases the voltage earlier in the coil in a runaway self-amplification of voltage. In particular, any unit massive fluid towards the outside of the turbine has to increase its angular velocity as it approaches the center to conserve angular momentum, as it increases its angular velocity the speed differential between the center of the turbine and the fluid is increased driving the center harder causing the the turbine to rotate faster which in turn accelerates the fluid at the edge of the turbine so that it gains angular momentum, which start the cycle all over again. It's a self-inducing system that maximizes the frictional transfer between the fluid and the disc. The fundamental problem that I see with the design is that as it spins faster to keep the liquid moving in a circle you need higher and higher centripetal force which creates a high pressure around the edges, putting a lot of friction and pressure on any seal you have between the disc and the stationary housing

I'm curious about cavitation, they work for heaters, instant steam generators. But ive read somewhere that it also helps with aerodynamics. A vehical with golfball size indents spaced an inch apart all over the car will supposedly more aerodynamic because it's ability to resist air friction by using its own cavitational eddy throughout the entire surface. Thus allowing air to flow against air with the boundry of that cavitation air/sound?.. Theoretically speaking it will only show larger improvements upon higher speeds. Research is hard to find on this subject matter, I'd test it myself if i had time and $. Thank you for your video content, i enjoy it very much!

A key feature that was not emphasized was the path of the gas. The gas moving at the outer circumference of the disk will rotate the disk at aproximately its same velocity. But as the gas spirals inwardly before exiting, the radius and circumference of the disk are shorter, causing the disk to spin faster. I suggest that the overall rotation is some function of the gas velocity, the entrance radius and the exit radius.

This is the technology used in the DISCFLO centrifugal pump. Great idea, great solution for many pumping applications. The downside is that the money you save in maintenance is eaten up by the electricity required to move the pumped fluid. If you need a fish ladder next to a hydroelectric dam, this pump can actually pump fish without harming them!

That was excellent. I finally fully understand the Tesla turbine

Built one some years ago from old computer hard disc drives. Stripped the platters from the drives, drilled central air exit holes close to their centers and stacked them (6 off) back in one of the drives with 0.5mm spacing between each platter. Used plastibond to shape the interior of the drive casing to have very small clearances between the disc outer edges and the casing and the outer faces of the disk stack. Used a 1.2mm mig welder tip as a air nozzle. Ran of 120psi air compressor. Sounded like a jet engine spooling up, measured rpm at 22000rpm. One problem tesla had was the turbine was capable of running at such high rpm that the disk materials of the day couldn't cope with the loads. I ran mine from a safe distance.

2:04 "laminar flow" Destin pops his head around the corner and says "whoo!"

We actually did the Tesla turbine as our project yet got rejected and this was mostly cuz of lecturers having no idea of it's working and they think getting 3.2 k rpm is an easy task using a inexpensive air blower and a bunch of DVD discs

Very lucidly explained. 👍

That appears to be a Fitz I-X-L Steel Overshoot Waterwheel a few seconds in. It also appears to have faulty feedstock. A properly designed, constructed, and operated overshot/overshoot is very efficient - 88% to 97% energy conversion.