Talk:Tesla turbine/Archive 1

Reddi's reverts
Reddi keeps trying to support the magic 95% number for the turbines, but there are NO PUBLISHED TESTS or numbers that suggest spectacular efficiency. Heck, even Tesla said that EFFICIENCY and POWER were pretty much inversely proportional in this design. Rick Boatright 01:18, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * "magic 95% number" is the % stated by _Telsa_ alone (this may be or not ... but it is worth mention what he said regarding HIS systems) ...
 * Tests? there are analysis (and ppl build then to spec today; which rice did not) ... JDR 07:40, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I've spent a fair bit of time looking for those analysis (which is why I amended the page in the first place). It basically boils down to a) Tesla made a wild arse guess as to the efficiency without any science or calculation behind it, b) Everyone that's tried to measure it gets a number less than 45% and c) the best theoretical analysis around pegs the maximum attainable efficiency under any design to be less than 65%. User:Mor

Reddi, it is both poor English AND wrong to put "a maximum efficiency of in the 1960s " that's poor English, and it's just wrong. Rice clearly stated in his 1991 paper, that he figures that the BEST that a boundary layer turbine can do with ANY injectors and ANY output ports is 65%... a number in the mid-60s. That's the efficiency, NOT the decade.
 * your attack on my spelling does nothing for the issue ...
 * Rice conducted experiments in the 60s it would seem from the links ... JDR
 * You missed Rick's point that you changed "This number is between 60 and 70" to "This number is in the 1960's" which is clearly odd. User:Mor

Unwarranted Personal Attack No, You missed my point. The skeptic indeed has a duty to point out flaws in the science or reasoning but a dirty little secret of the scientific method is the attack on the messenger as well as the message. Many misguided skeptics use personal attacks to buttress arguments against the scientific rationale of opponents. Statements like, "If one of my students submitted an article like this he or she would get a D." is an example of a personal attack disguised as a rational argument. Both valid and invalid scientific arguments can be presented in poor English. (or any other language for that matter) If one doubts this, just read some of the many scientific papers accepted as "mainstream" by the scientific community. Teachers the world over constantly rail against misuse of language in technical journals - not that it has any effect. My point is that criticism of technical articles should be confined to the scientific and engineering elements. If you want to criticize the linguistic usage, do so in a manner divorced from critical review of the science. <><><><><> Also - Tesla himself said that efficiency and power were inversely related. Every test, by ever designer shows that TT efficiency is high only under LIGHTLY LOADED conditions. to get high efficiency, you either need light loads, or you need LOTS AND LOTS OF DISKS so that each disk is contributing only slightly to the power output. Tesla, did this in a different way, using HUGE disks (60 inches) which resulted in a DIFFERENT problem.... material failure.
 * High efficiency would come from a true multistage TT (more disks). JDR
 * More disks doesn't make it a multi-staged turbine any more than more blades makes a conventional turbine multi-staged. User:Mor

Finally, you keep changing clear statements of fact to "reportedly."
 * Yes ... I will continue to put "reportedly" in shaky info, which you add ... JDR
 * It's not shaky. It's coming straight out of the refs! User:Mor

For example: the thickness of the boundary layer is dependent on the viscosity of the fluid. Simply true. The highest efficiency of a TT is found when the disk spacing approximates the thickness of the boundary layer. Also true. Therefore, disk spacing is (should be) dependent on the nature of the fluid, A TT for air is different than a TT for steam, is different than one for pumping water is different from one for.... etc etc etc.
 * All this is true and that is the reason why Rice's test are not reliable ... his system DID NOT match Telsa's designs .... JDR
 * Everything I've read says that the only odd thing about Rice's design was the inlet stuff. That's got nothing to do with the inter-disk spacing. More, Rice actually did some calculations around the optimal inter-disk spacing which is more than Tesla did. User:Mor

Now, every time I make that edit, you put weasel words around it. Look, Tesla was not God. He was a genius, but one who lived in the 1800's, who didn't know what a Reynolds number was, and who never investigated boundary layers. Have you READ any of the masters thesis or dissertations on TT's? Seen the results? They're published on the web (refs would be useful). Quite trying to make a TT something magical. It's a device, it's not a wonderful overlooked, magic device. It has its applications, but it isn't the be-all-end-all of mechanisms. Rick Boatright 14:46, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
 * Very good ... you keep trying to say I'm "deifying" Tesla, which is simple not true ... sorry to disappoint you ...
 * Tesla probably did know about Osborne Reynolds, and his pre-1900 lectures. I'll come back to this later.
 * TT are not "magical" ... It is real tech that has multiple and many uses uses (not a "cure all, miracle item" as you try to say I'm stating, but a advanced piece of technology that is under used and has been neglected) ... sorry you can't see that ...
 * Sincerely, JDR

Tesla's Turbine has nothing to do with Prandt
I am familiar with all the literature on the turbine. None of it cites Prandt.. Nor would any author have any reason to connect him to Tesla's engine. I removed that vague reference to Prandt to keep the article true to the topic and the available facts. [ Comment by User:69.211.17.126 - 00:29, 19 Jun 2005 ( Solipsist 11:10, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC) ) ]
 * Thanks for the input. -- Solipsist 11:12, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Designs exactly similar to Tesla's Turbine have been called "Prandtl layer turbine". The effect that drives both are the same. I believe a patent refered to this (the various name of the same basic design; I'll see if I can find it later).JDR

Article needs to be cleaned up
Large parts of it make no sense. Confab I have changed a few of the things that were wrong. Parts of this article were clearly written by individual/s who were confused between gas turbine engines (a whole system) and gas turbine stages (parts of a system) such as this one.93.96.119.56 (talk) 01:01, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Maximum speed limitations
Does any one know what the maximum speed of this turbine is, if any? It seems to me that the fluid could be moving very fast inside the turbine, given the right heat resistant materials and bearings, because unlike the bladed turbine there are no edges for shock drag. cc24.137.78.34 00:43, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Failed Good Article Nomination
I see that whether Prandt has any relation to the Tesla turbine has been debated previously. It is not clear whether it's been established whether Prandt layer turbine is an appropriate alternative name or not. If the issue has been resolved, and it is an appropriate name, there is still no citation for this in the article.

Also, the article seems a little incomplete to me. This article makes no mention of the utilization of such turbines. I don't know anything on this topic, so forgive my ignorance, but was one even ever built? I can't get this information from this article. And finally there are some citations missing in a couple places.--Konstable 03:33, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Unreliable sources
I am concerned about the sources for this article re WP:RS, since examining the websites shows they tend toward sites promoting wacky "free energy" schemes. ---CH 02:29, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Example: the article links to two "books" published by Twenty First Century Books, which says it is "A mail order bookstore specializing in titles related to the inventor Nikola Tesla". One of the books is by Gary Peterson, owner of Twenty First Century Books, and the other by Jeff Hayes, who maintains the website of the Engine Builder's Association in Milwaukee, WI. But a casual Google search suggests that this publishing house is not a reliable source of information: See Scalar field theory (pseudoscience)-Motionless Electrical Generator. Hope the reasons for my concern about at least the links to tfcbooks.com are now obvious! ---CH 03:48, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Solutions to Tesla's Secrets and the Soviet Tesla Weapons, which claims: "The long-searched-for Tesla secrets have been solved by Tom Bearden ... Bearden's solutions are truly a major breakthrough"
 * 2) Proceedings of the 1990 International Tesla Symposium, including "A Tesla Wave Physics for a Free Energy Universe" and "Detecting Galactic Superwaves: An Appeal to Scalar Wave Astronomers"
 * 3) Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature : Tesla's Science of Energy, which claims: "Tesla discovered the evidence for charge clusters (as patented by Ken Shoulders and Hal Puthoff), the overunity effects of air arcs.." ("over-unity" is crankcode for perpetual motion machine)
 * 4) Scalar Waves by Konstantin Meyl, a fringe physicist

Efficiency dispute
I see no absolute reason why the Tesla turbine can’t achieve efficiencies approaching that of other turbines. 95% is quite a normal number to observe in axial turbines, the key in those turbines is in keeping irreversibility’s to a minimum, a turbine with 100% efficiency has no irreversibility’s and can convert 100% of the energy extracted from the working gas to work at the shaft. Irreversibility’s come from the things like heat loss, friction, flow separation, shock waves and turbulence.

In the Tesla turbine the loses (irreversibility’s) are normally sited as the Outlet And the boundary layer mechanism it self

Firstly by maintaining a decent pressure gradient at the outlet separation should be eliminated. You can be quite rough with the airflow in a turbine, as the positive pressure gradient (the flow is from high to low pressure) pushes the boundary layer and stops it separating, due to the flow reversing, (as is the case in a negative pressure gradient) the turbines in a jet engine often have blades which change the direction of the flow by 100 degrees (past a right angle!) flow in the compressor is a little bit fickle as it is going against a pressure gradient and so 30 -40 degrees is normal. There for the only significant loss at the out let would be from a miss mach in pressures, releasing the gas too early before all the work has been extracted, this would make the turbine appear to operate at a lower efficiency but may explain why people sight higher efficiencies when the turbines are connected in series. Also if separation at the outlet was a problem surly some sort of diffuser, to gradually bend the radial flow to axial, would fix this?

Secondly I have heard that shear losses is the major contributor to the poor efficiency, and that as the TT is a boundary layer device therefore there are large shear losses therefore low efficiency. This seems a little simplistic. Isn’t all the friction in the direction that work is being transferred? There for isn’t all the friction work converted to work on the disk, or dose the slippage between the gas flow and the disks result in a net power loss. Have any of these "analytical studies" been published so I can see the equations that all this is biased?

Thirdly when operating with a compressible gas, the gas will expand as it travels through the turbine, and the pressure decreases (as it travels radialy inwards and gets closer to the axis) dose this expansion result in the gas flowing faster, and if so what happens to the resulting reaction? Similarly what happens to the coriolis force of the gas as it travels radial inwards?


 * For starters, you can't extract all the energy from the gas because a net shear of zero can only be achieved at radius zero, but then there's no way to get the gas out. Also, all the friction, while certainly transferring energy, will definitely result in heating up the platter and the gas. That energy is lost. No way around it.
 * You also can't avoid turbulence at the inlet, the platters need some positive material thickness so they don't break apart; thus, the edges will reduce efficiency (or – if you make them sharp – you have more disk separation than you'd like, which introduces turbulence farther in).
 * smurfix 21:39, 29 October 2007 (UTC)


 * There is a paper by Rice that explains efficiency problems with TT: http://www.rexresearch.com/teslatur/turbine3.htm#rice Quote:
 * With proper use of the analytical results, the rotor efficiency using laminar flow can be very high, even above 95%. However, in order to attain high rotor efficiency, the flowrate number must be made small which means high rotor efficiency is achieved at the expense of using a large number of disks and hence a physically large rotor. For each value of flow rate number there is an optimum value of Reynolds number for maximum efficiency. With common fluids, the required disk spacing is dismally small causing laminar flow to tend to be large and heavy for a prescribed throughflow rate.67.188.208.211 (talk) 19:24, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Links to Websites
How absolutely hilarious that a "B" quality article links to numerous websites which are squatted domains or wikis which are hopelessly vandalized. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.24.13.178 (talk) 05:46, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

magnetohydrodynamic generator
Is it possible that a tesla turbine could also function as a magnetohydrodynamic generator? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.15.43.23 (talk) 02:41, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
 * No turbine can ever be a generator. A turbine drives, a generator is driven. Kölscher Pitter--93.129.129.45 (talk) 08:49, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Tesla was a genius his turbine would have been a wonder in gneral use
Know that there was a tesla Turboine Powered vehicle a tri wheel car in the 190s Sevestopol,Ca. Tesla was genius however no Tesla Musuem in the US Why?(dr. son Andre' J.) Andreisme (talk) 00:25, 9 April 2009 (UTC)decedamwedd480921stcent.

Angular momentum
this is my first post on Wikipedia, so i apologize if I am intruding. It seems that something has been overlooked in the operation of the Tesla turbine. When air is introduced tangentially at the periphery of the discs, it has angular momentum due to its angular velocity. As the air travels radially inwards, and if its angular momentum is conserved, its angular velocity should greatly increase, increasing the drag torque it exerts on the discs, so the air, spiralling inward, would exert higher peripheral drag forces on the discs as it travels toward the center. That seems to me the secret of the efficiency of the Tesla turbine. Dickmcbirney (talk) 01:26, 9 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Do you have a source for that? e.g. images, newspaper, books? Wikipedia needs sources. Also, the angular momentum is transferred to the turbine. If the air acted as you described, the turbine would net generate energy, creating a perpetual motion machine, which is not possible. I5-X600K (talk) 01:58, 13 December 2020 (UTC)