Nikola Tesla was such a great scientist that humanity has yet to truly appreciate the scope of his discoveries. Most of his inventions, about which legends still circulate, relate to the possibility of transferring electrical energy to a distance. However, among the patents, and there are much more than a thousand, which this outstanding theoretician and experimental practitioner received, there are others relating exclusively to the mechanical components of machines. One of them describes the principle of operation of an unusual design that converts the energy of a gas stream into rotational motion. Tesla turbine - this is the name of this mechanism.
Each invention must be unique, such are the modern rules for registering a patent, and they were the same in 1913, when the great scientist received another copyright certificate. The originality of Tesla's invention consists in the absence of blades, which are equipped with the rotor of almost any turbine. The kinetic energy of the air stream, or any other gas, is transferred not due to direct pressure on the blades placed at an angle to it, but by the movement of the boundary flow of the medium surrounding completely flat disks. The Tesla turbine uses such a property of gases as their viscosity.
All inventions of this extraordinary person are very beautiful. Tesla's turbine is no exception. Its beauty lies in simplicity, not in primitiveness, but in that refined conciseness, which became the handwriting of genius. It has never occurred to anyone before to spin a disk with a gas stream directed in the same plane as it.
Of course, to increase the efficiency of the entire device, the number of disks should be increased and the distance between them should be minimized, therefore, the Tesla turbine is a rotor mounted on the drive shaft, consisting of many flat "plates", and the stator is the space in which this shaft rotates with nozzles directed tangentially, that is, perpendicular to the radius of the rotor discs. This design provides a huge advantage if you need to change the direction of rotation. To do this, simply switch the inlet to the nozzle that was previously the outlet, and the entire turbine will begin to rotate in the reverse direction.
Another advantage is the nature of the gas’s movement, it is laminar, that is, there are no vortex flows in it, overcoming of which useful energy is consumed, and with which the designers of turbines struggle so hard. In general, at the time when Tesla invented his turbine, engineers had many problems with materials for making blades, so he figured out how to do without them at all.
The design has its drawbacks. These include the low gas flow rate at which the Tesla turbine is efficient. However, this does not in any way diminish the significance of this invention, which may suddenly be needed and become simply an indispensable solution to the technical problem, as was the case with other N. Tesla patents.
Simplicity of construction is an obvious quality that Tesla turbine possesses. You can make it with your own hands, however, for this, you still need considerable qualifications and high accuracy in performing all the work. Indeed, the quality of the disks and the small gap between them, which should be very uniform, as well as the casing with nozzles with the help of simple tools, are practically impossible.