Sorry for the confusion on the efficiency. The 65% efficiency (thermodynamic efficiency) I discussed in the video is for "smaller" turbines (under 1000 kW). Modern large industrial turbines can now reach efficiencies of 90% or higher, as a lot of people have mentioned in the comments.
Tesla turbines have a second failing. The disc material deforms the faster it spins. With close tolerances, the outside of the discs eventually impact the housing.
You forgot to mention something very important. When the turbine reaches its resonant frequency. The discs start to vibrate and flex like a tuning fork, and the discs will shake themselves until failure, or they'll smash into the sides of the volute casing.
@SaraMorgan-ym6ue nah, everthing can be affected by resonance. its just how harmonics and resonant frequencies works. Even when you start up a regular turbine. You've gotta increase the speed in a controlled way to avoid hitting the resonant frequency. Just the consequence of that is far less bad than for a tesla turbine. I got an engineering degree and worked as a steam plant operator to know this.
@SaraMorgan-ym6ue dont see how that has anything to do with vibrations that occur within a turbine. If you're gonna joke, at least make it clever. That wasn't funny, just dumb.
no i thought cable television was going to die. but they just brought all the awful advertising to youtube and censored almost all of my favourite content. youtube isn't great
When a resisting torque is applied to a regular turbine shaft, the weight and viscosity of the fluid drive the blades. The tesla turbine relies solely on the boundary friction of the fluid so any applied torque will drastically reduce the output of the turbine. Learned all about them in fluid mechanics
@@dookyshoes2684 no I would argue not a regurgitation, we were taught the math behind it and learned why the physics work the way they do. Engineering school is very different than learning opinions, it is learning how and why things are the way they are not being told an opinion
@@69FTWBthis guy does not seem very technically inclined. He didn't say the mechanism by which it drops twerk like you did, so you definitely were adding more info. Dude is just r/wooshed
The reason is that they suck compared to bladed turbines, especially for hydropower. Pelton, Kaplan, and Francis turbines all reach efficiencies of >90%, are less sensitive to debris, and scale much better to large systems. However Tesla "turbines" are regularly used as pumps for highly corrosive fluids.
@@simperingham it's essentially just the opposite, a motor drives a stack of disks, pumping a fluid from the center outwards. It's nice for cases where it's difficult to manufacture blades that withstand the liquid. For highly corrosive fluids, compatible materials (mostly glass or PTFE) are either difficult to machine or not very strong. Same for abrasive fluids, much easier to make hardened disks than hardened blades. The other nice thing is that there are no pressure spikes and associated vibrations as the pumping action is constant.
Tesla pumps also handle any fluctuations in back pressure smoothly. You can instantly shut off the flow into or out of a Tesla pump with no problems. Do this to a turbine and there will be catastrophic problems.
As an aircraft mechanic of nearly a decade I can promise you a disk you have to pull the entire shaft out to replace is much more work than a fan blade you can unbolt Edit: Spelling
Some fan blades are mad annoying to take out. I worked on pratt f100 220s and you had to wiggle all the blades out of a lock to just remove 1 from damage.
@Slaydur believe me brother from one fighter maintainer to another I get it. But imagine having to take the entire shaft apart just to get to a single disk. Can't imagine a segmented shaft would be fun to work with.
@anthonyhettinger9702 because that's A.) More expensive to replace and B.) Doesn't save any time, as the fan blades (or discs) are attached to a shaft that drives a gearbox that gives power to the rest of the plane. This in turn drives a dozen (give or take) Ops checks. So even if it was built separately you aren't saving any time, if anything building separate ones and slotting them in, then allowing a back shop to work the busted one costs more time and money (in the form of man hours at the very least).
My grandfather was a navy aircraft mechanic, and my mom said when she went to the Intrepid with him, he pointed to the planes he had worked on. I wish I knew which ones when I visited but she forgot.
@@donskiverI’m normally a grammatical nit picker, but your come-back to that was totally on point. Also - if nobody did what you do, modern society wouldn’t function, and people would be dying by the millions of easily preventable diseases. Thank you! 👏 👏 👏
The greatest flaw of the tesla turbine is that it's (too/more) efficient at higher speeds, but we don't have materials that don't deform at those speeds.
i went to school for water supply technology and have a degree. the water industry uses laminar flow pumps. they’re called low shear pumps in the industry and are uncommon but are used. they’re used in low speed applications so the cons of putting the discs under stress are less prevalent. they’re desirable for these applications because it’s pulsation free
This reminds me of my buddy getting his electrical degree and explaining to me why sometimes you want an AC power source converted to DC to maintain consistency in the driver or vice versa. In this case with the laminar turbine being DC and the turbulent turbine being AC.
It's not really about it being fashionable, but rather just him and his inventions being well-known. Asking why they aren't used more, when a brilliant inventor built them, is a reasonable thing to do.
@@MartinFinnerup - Why aren't turbines used more? Well in most applications they are wildly inefficient. And in the few areas where they ARE efficient enough to be applicable. there are FAR better designs than Tesla's version. I'm sick of people and videos that don't understand technology, and make it seem like there's all kinds of ancient wisdom that is mysteriously not being used today, and would somehow be better than modern engineering and the solutions it provides.
@@MartinFinnerup Brilliant inventor is relative. From a fanboi's perspective everything Tesla touched was brilliant. From a practical perspective other people have had better ideas for most the same applications Tesla worked on. There is a mystique around Tesla that garners more... admiration than he earned.
@@reidflemingworldstoughestm1394I'd like to see how many millions of people tried thinking in terms of "energy, frequency, and vibration," and still didn't manage wireless electricity transmission in the century that has passed. Even with 2 world wars and a cold war where such a technology would change the outcomes (and money was no object). Perhaps, just maybe, he really was just your average inventor. Although that doesn't change the fact Edison was a capitalist pig with copper mines, rubber imports, lumber companies, everything needed to wire the country end to end. And he was an ahole.
Slight correction here, modern hydro turbines are well above 85% efficient. Pumped hydro for instance has a round trip efficiency of about 85% and that includes the pump/motor efficiency, turbine/generator efficiency as well as head losses from turbulence and frictional losses in the pipes. Matching the turbine type (Kaplan, Francis, Pelton) and runner (turbine) blade design with the head and flow is important to ensure maximum efficiency. Similar to a pump a hydro turbine has an efficiency curve with a peak efficiency.
The other problem with the Tesla turbine is that if something gets inside that could damage the blades it'll damage all blades whereas with a regular turbine only a few blades would be likely to be damaged which means more down time with the Tesla blades and potentially more money lost. Although, i wonder if anyone has decided to make sideways blades that also uses laminar flow at the same time and see what kind of strength and efficiencies they could get out of it.
no wonder. I kept doubting why would force from frictions be better than from frontal impact. It makes no sense at all. Sure, tesla turbine is prettier and probably dyson would like it
@@MrDeerbomb Tesla turbines are super effective at high speeds. Like really high speeds, so high in fact that we do not have material that could withstand them. But if we one day discover one, they would be fantasticaly usefull
It's not just because of the industry being used to bladed turbines, discs would still be incredibly easy to manufacture. It's also because of scale. The Tesla turbine spins much faster than a regular turbine to extract the same energy. The issue? You can't make it large because it's own rotation would tear it to shreds. You could theoretically split up a fluid into dozens of tiny turbines, but at that point your piping increases losses and the manufacturing difficulty grows because you need more smaller discs.
@@StopNuclearBallisticMissle oh I don’t know maybe it’s the rapid deconstruction of a large metal disc spinning at mach duck…. That will subsequently destroy whatever is around it
I feel most of his designs were meant to have 0 resistance. Like using this in space might be more practical since gradual change was his goal. He also tried to make things “harmonize” together a lot so using laminar flow was low energy cost with high conversion efficiency. Guy wanted to use minimal fuel but that means it doesn’t scale or adjust to any load change
Yo DAwg, don't bring them steams peeps into this.... anyone arguing this sheets could work on any scale is straight regarded, not well regarded, but straight up re gar ded
Exactly most modern hydroelectric dams are 90% efficient. 100% efficiency is impossible partly because of mechanical fiction and if the fuild is still moving that is also lost energy.
@@gh0st_0f_b0b_chandler except “these sheets” do work as you can see in the video, they just are far from optimal for most applications though. Anyone claiming that something just doesn’t work when it clearly does is the one who’s opinion can be disregarded. This video is talking about a concept not an actual application and there will be applications where this has advantages over other kinds of turbine. Any engineer that disregards something just saying that it wouldn’t work at any scale (especially when the design actually works) isn’t a good engineer.
You totally ignored the biggest problem that centrifugal forces warp the discs that results in touching from the discs under extreme high speed. Results in an explosive deconstruction
It's simply because they don't allow for the transfer of power from the fluid column to the turbine itself. The whole point of a Tesla Turbine is friction at the boundary layer of the discs. But as shown in this video, when the fluid and discs are out of sync (as in the case of an applied load), turbulent flow develops which stops the formation of fluid friction at the boundary layer and therefore stops the rotation of the turbine shaft
One of the main issues is also lack of adequate torque...in other words it has speed but if u add resistance to it .its not gona be able to overcome the load...the normal turbines still can
There is a practical size/rpm limit as well. When your turbine edge hits the speed of sound it stops working. I remember doing the math in physics for tip speed and centrifugal loads. Forces get scary pretty quickly as the rpm and diameter increase.
If that were true in this case, the Tesla turbine would be dominant cause the discs are easier to produce. The discs don't last long is the real issue here.
It's not only about the speed of the shaft rotation, but about torque. If you want to stop the shaft with a disc, you will, but to stop the shaft with blades you should use a lot of force
The Tesla Turbine has a critical fail point in that it is TOO EFFECTIVE. It is remarkably easy to spin the disk, regardless of material, so fast that centripetal for rips it apart. This problem only gets worse as you scale the device up since a larger wheel equates to a larger circumference and a greater edge speed with the same RPM. The Tesla turbine is such a good design that it is physically impossible to implement. It is NOT because our infrastructure relies on blade turbines already.
You can increase the torque of a Tesla turbine without increasing the input pressure you have to increase the size of the disks. However as the disk-size increases, centrifugal forces increase. Do you need stronger materials. So upscaling a Tesla turbine requires more expensive materials and has an upper limit beyond that no material exists that can withstand the centrifugal forces. Where as upscaling normal turbines is way easier without material limitation.
if your stream provides more strength than the turbine you have can convert; upscaling is not the only solution, you can also add more turbines. & when you have many small turbine instead of a big one, when one fails you still have the other running & maintenance is way easier & cheaper. good luck with your upscaled turbine the day it fails cause you'll find yourself without electricity & will be dependent of the manufacturer to fix it
@@dimitrijekrstic7567 i'm not your buddy & if you believe the banksters that control industries world wide are your friend & work for your wellbeing & freedom you're an idi0t.
@@dimitrijekrstic7567 once you realize what toxic politics and beaurocracy deos to engineering offices. You'll be amazed at how little IQ it takes to solve problems and troubleshoot new or old technologies and concepts.
Tesla turbines are commonly used in waste treatment facilities because there's no blades for toilet paper and tampons among other items to get stuck on.
No thank you. Nikola Tesla is why some people still refuse to accept Enstein's General Relativity. Imagine if Tesla was alive today spewing his Electrical Universe nonsense.
There is a general rule in nature, higher the coefficient of efficiency, lower the power. you can see if from Stirling engines, to rocket propulsion systems. So, the same applies for turbines
Tesla turbines are limited by the strength of the material used to make the disk. If the disk spins too fast, it could deform or even break apart inside the housing. This drawback affects operating speeds and pump sizes.
i heard these turbines need to spin insanely fast for them to be viable so they arent useful when you only have a slow moving force to turn them or they'd need alot of gear reduction
I'd heard similar: Tesla Turbines also spin too fast, and it's much harder to build one that can handle the internal stresses of spinning that fast. And if it's not spinning fast enough, it doesn't have a high efficiency.
it's a bit like rotary engines. they are by design able to spin fast with perfect balance but are not efficien't and low torque. you can make a slow one but it won't perform nearly as good as traditional turbines
@@stringbender3this is exactly the opposite of what it does. A turbine is based on the relation of torque correlation with velocity difference. Velocity difference caused by load. And power based on surface area times force applied. The Tesla has very high surface area, and high speed media would induce a massive torque when the turbine is stationary. When it comes to rpm, you just about divide the media speed by the radius. Tip speed ~ media speed. Make the turbine larger diameter to lower rpm.
I looked at a water mill turbine on CZcams over a hundred years old. The was a moveable section to wrap tighter to or away from the turbine feeding the water into the Turbine blades and the outlet left through a vertical pipe and fell into the river. The weight of the water leaving through the tube was pulling the water. The Turbine was pushed by the water coming in and pulled by the water leaving. The size was not that large and it replaced a very large water wheel. It had not been apart in 100 years but still worked, the bearings and seals where external. It was simply unbolted the worn part damaged by water flow over 100 years repaired and re-assembled. The moveable section was a throttle for the turbine just like on a modern day variable geometry turbo on a car engine but simpler. Smart people move humans along.
@@diegoschwaderer398 lmao what agenda? The "disk rotating at 25k rpm exploding after 5 seconds" agenda? There's not material in the world that could withstand such forces, that's why tesla turbines are not used. Agenda he says, what a clown.
A turbine's efficiency is defined by its ability to extract kinetic energy of the fluid. It becomes maximal when the exit speed of the fluid is minimal, over a maximally large exit area. Therefore the Tesla design is suboptimal.
A large failing of the Tesla turbine is the materials required to make a disc that truly benefits from laminar flow doesn’t exist. It must be resistant to any deformation throughout the disc, light enough to not apply extra drag to the liquid that is propelling the disc, and must not swell or compress because laminar flow has a very narrow range of tolerance. Striking the housing or other discs will annihilate the efficiency, of course. Even our best meta materials found today can’t meet the standards required for a Tesla turbine to reach those theoretical efficiency levels.
There's also some materials-science limitations, the blades move really fast, and if they start to wobble, they can warp or shatter. Solutions to this can be found, sure, but Tesla lived and worked before many modern materials were invented.
The reality is that without any resistance there is no way to apply any torque and thusly the turbine can seize very easily. It is also useless in any sort of high torque application which is essentially all kinetic applications. Perhaps it could succeed as a generator with a set rpm and load.
@@Enter-wl3zf Miatas are small so for enthusiasts, as a joke, when they see small power sources or RC scale v8 engines they say 'put it in a miata' as if it's an upgrade
Not sure on these facts but I heard the discs need to be made at a 2m diameter and spin something crazy like 27,000 rpm to make an efficient turbine to replace current power supply stations. And no one has even come close to making a disc that size without it shattering
I'm not an expert but if you could spin 2m diameter disc at 27000rpm, the energy amount of inertia would be very high, and probably a power plant would be possible.
@@shaakenbake "if you could spin 2m diameter disc at 27000rpm" that IF is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, physics apply no matter how great an idea look on paper. There's no material in the world (and maybe never) which can withstand such forces, especially not if it has to work 24/7 for years.
@@TheLumberjack1987 Especially considering you'd need a huge gearbox to get those 27000 RPM down to something useable, probably in the 1000-3000 RPM range. The friction in a ca. 1:100 gear box would be enough to make this design less efficient than turbines we have today. And the wear would be incredibly expensive. You'd probably have to replace all the bearings yearly and reliability would be a huge issue. The reality for engineers is that spinning fast is often a bad thing, and the turbine alone doesn't make a powerplant.
@@planterion7969 exactly, but remember, Tesla was the second coming of lightning christ, so we're not using his inventions because of some vague satanic/woke agenda according to his fanboys....
There’s a few reasons why this doesn’t work. One reason is the pressure it puts on the bearings when the air or fluid has to escape through the middle. It puts too much pressure, heat, and friction on the bearing. See the comment section for the real expert opinion.
I would say the bigger issue is that if you build a true Tesla Turbine at scale there is no material on earth you can use to make the discs without the rotational force ripping them apart.
I am not able to see your comment but I think it has something to do with vibration playing a part. In a true and perfect tesla turbine vibrations would be a consequence of imperfections and imperfect rotational force.
The Tesla Turbine has another major advantage that makes them essential for certain use cases. That being that there is an uninterrupted clear flow from input to output such that any solid contaminant smaller than the gap between disks can pass unimpeded. Thus for things like pumping drainage water where other pumps can clog, designs like the Tesla Turbine don't.
@@ATEC101 Not very up to date on things, are you? Look up Tesla Disk Pumps. There's a huge market for them in industrial applications, so someone is making bank, and it's not you.
The one thing not mentioned that is a huge advantage of a Tesla turbine is the fact it has nearly zero pump pulsing and can be great for applications requiring laminar flow.
Really interesting video, thanks. Also, a consideration for issues with the tesla turbine is the sensitive stall speed, and also the higher rotational masses as compared to axial flow turbines for thermal plant.
If the Tesla turbine actually worked as intended, then manufacturers would have adopted this design over the more difficult and expensive to manufacture turbines. If there is one thing that manufacturers desire, it is making products at lower cost to increase profits. The primary reason for Tesla's turbine not being widely adopted is that it isn't efficient under load. The efficiency of Tesla's design decreases as the load on the shaft increases. There are other problems, such as the risk of clogging.
Tesla stated his turbines didn’t have torque and were not more efficient unless they were hooked together in series, I assume he meant harnessing the exhaust from one and feeding another that was attached to the same shaft. I’d love to see someone do this to confirm if there is more torque and efficiency
It doesn't solve the problem. To get power from the turbine, you need to load it's shaft with a torque. You can get higher torque after a gearbox but the turbine still needs to have a certain torque. This has been studied since many years and it's not out of stupidity that bladed turbines are used the most, it's because they are more efficient.
Do you know how much friction and wear gear boxes have? Even if these had 100% efficiency, a gearbox that would have the ratio to make this able to turn a generator ot sth without stalling would have enough friction to bring the efficiency below something like a modern pelton turbine.
Did you really just credit Tesla with inventing AC???? So we're just ignoring Faraday and Blathy and Stanely??? You know, the guys that can actually be credited with it? Just going with the pidgeon f#^$&, eh?
Nikola Tesla has the biggest cult folllowing of people who have 0 clue about science or engineering. Michael Faraday was the firs person to demonstrate AC, nobody invented it.
You also need turbine pumps to physically lift liquids to higher points, preferably with a backflow device. Discs cand overcome that type of head pressure. Cool idea, almost too efficient in a gravity setting like a water dam. Can’t keep up with the rpms and warps the shaft.
These are best utilized in magnetically neutral or "zero gravity" applications. The speed is required for properly propelling magnetic fields. This is also efficient and effective for gyroscopically stabilized platforms. Like a space port
Oh boy. This is literally what I do for a living, missed a few points. 1) Metallurgy sucked when we built most of our steam turbines were built, so good luck making a large turbine. We didn’t get away from interference fit disks until ~1980s due to this. 2) it’s soooo much cheaper to swap blades due to FOD damage, fatigue cracking due to condenser back pressure events, grid disturbances etc. I couldn’t imagine having a spare disk on hand. 3) Creep…after a few years of service you’ll for sure impact your inner cylinder. List keeps going Man, just a bad idea over all at large scale
Doesn’t mean we can’t retrofit them in. Specially if the back end as well as front end is cheeper even after the modifications to fit it. And yes I get they are not for every application but there are plenty they could be. Specially ones that when at full open the torque load drops off. But repairs and maintenance on these as well as I’m betting life and reliability are higher than the more complex impeller systems.
and thats where the issue starts, the tesla turbine needs to be much larger and spin much faster to generate the same amount of torque, so much so that youd need some very expensive engineering to have it not rip itself apart
I love the design, and the concept, tesla was way ahead of his time, and he was all about efficiency and harmony, yes his design is flawed compared to modern day turbines but if you ran these in a series I do think they would be more economical, especially with more development into improvments to the design, you see the main issue is money, and big manufacturers want money for their products, if we all went to using these types of concepts from Tesla designs I feel like eventually there wouldnt be much money to make because of how they are built and used, it would be vastly cheaper due to simplicity, this is kind of the same argument as to why we just dont build nuclear power plants instead of wind energy farms, 1 power plant takes up way less space, provides much more power, and is guaranteed rain or shine, or hear me out we can build a couple big ass tesla towers in every state and see how that goes lol, free energy from static electricity naturally in our atmosphere because the earth is a giant geo electric magnet...Would take lots of copper windings though...just saying I really have to ask how bad are tesla designs compared to modern designs when we all know we can obviously improve on them given enough time and money and braincells, he gave us completely free energy eons ago, why havent we built upon those designs today??? Why did the government take all of his documents and designs and lock them away??? Why are there laws against us people putting our own free energy systems in place at our homes on our properties we pay for??? It's all bullshite if you ask me...If all you engineer's were told right now to build us a tesla turbine that's on par or better than we have now would you shy away from the task and contract??? I'm not saying his designs are the best or better just that he was truly onto something and I believe with todays technology we can make them even better, how about an arc reactor please lol...
Depends entirely on the application, you are thinking only of a jet engine or a turbocharger. "Modern turbines" are also driven by steam and by cold water.
In one of my engineering classes these were brought up, aparrently they dont scale up very well, and to make one large enough to create useful amou ts of power you would be pushing the limits of current metals, they create so much centrifugal force the disks blow themselves apart, thats why tesla gave up on the design once he discovered they just cant be scaled up to a usable size, there are a ton of very innovative engine designs that work great at small sizes but dont really work when made big enough to be really usable, like the little steam pop pop boats, saw one a guy built big enough to run a row boat but even at that size it was getting pretty sketchy
Bladed turbines I can only imagine create more torque. Discs will allow more slipping under a load. It's not just about RPM, pressure plays a part in practicality.
I'm imagining an alternate universe where many of Tesla's innovations were adopted and became standard and we'd all be living in futuristic cities with flying cars right now.
You have a child’s level of comprehension about how any of this works. Tesla turbines are regularly used as pumps when the application calls for it. This isn’t some tech that got buried. **Engineers** determined there are usually better options.
It’s literally not about the money it’s about the fact that these don’t work great as turbines. Especially modern ones with upper 90 percentile range of efficiency
With this idea of a turbine you can put motors onto the insides of floats like lap pool lane dividers and string them across a river to generate electricity with minimal resistance. It also has less impact on the generators
Fun fact: Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla were both arch rivals. Ever since Tesla had his amazing ideas, Edison would get jealous and dismiss his plans.
Unfortunately for your fantasies thats just not true, the reason they arent used is they provide much lower torque at the same sized as other turbines used. They are impractical and even at best would only end up about as efficient but much more expensive than current offerings
@@stephenallen4635 Well, not entirely true. We can increase the torque with some clever engineering. Like, you could make the end of the beam itself part of an electric motor, so the spinning of the rod will create electricity directly. This bypasses a lot of the initial torque issues. The main problem is that even with increased torque, a similar shaped "normal" turbine outputs more electricity. Since 60% efficiency into a generator that is twice as big, gives more electricity.
@@Predated2 Well from an engineering standpoint, if you wanted to make this a direct drive to the generator, you'd need a generator that can take insane RPMs. (As mentioned in the video,) to be in any way efficient, Tesla turbines need very high RPM. It's already hard to make the disks that can take those RPMs at industrial scale, never mind a complex and heavy device like a generator. You'd need to gear it down significantly to make it useful, introducing enough drag to make it less efficient than competitors and enough wear to make maintenance very expensive and reliability low. Things spinning fast isn't something we want, same reason we're trying to remove gearboxes from wind turbines so the generators can spin slower. That can extend their life by 20 times.
Friction wearing (including bearings) is less on modern turbines. Given that the power output is almost the same, the cost effectiveness of the Tesla turbine is less.
No the reason these never took off is because under the load we need them to run at, which is much higher than in your video - the disks warp after a very relatively short period of time, which would result in frequent replacement, downtime, and a much higher chance of failure during production use. And since turbines are found very commonly in aircrafts that are obliterated if they crash, the higher efficiency, but also much higher wear rate isn't sustainable for commercial use. Thicker disks would technically allow for higher RPMs but in the end the forces win and the same warping would occur.
Sorry for the confusion on the efficiency. The 65% efficiency (thermodynamic efficiency) I discussed in the video is for "smaller" turbines (under 1000 kW). Modern large industrial turbines can now reach efficiencies of 90% or higher, as a lot of people have mentioned in the comments.
Good save, I like format of your videos, keep going please:)
Few slots
Tesla turbines might make more sense in the modern era for use with super critical CO2.
I wish you would explain more how this applies to the engine.
So what happens if I put an industrial turbine in a car?
Tesla turbines have a second failing. The disc material deforms the faster it spins. With close tolerances, the outside of the discs eventually impact the housing.
This plus the faster it goes, the more likely something will go wrong, either the material isn't durable enough or not cost effective enough
Agree, there is no way they can make a material that would work
@@ObstacleZone There ARE materials, but they're exotic (expensive) things.
@RIBill oh ok I was going on your first comment stating that the material deforms the faster it spins, but their are materials that work you say?
@ObstacleZone Probably some Tungsten-Titanaium alloy that could survive it but imagine the cost of making that work in an industrial scale?
Engineers in the comments coming in hard with the extra context! Love to see it.
Yup...Some of them are engine-far though 💀
That's why internet was created. Peak internet.........
It so nice to see the good site of the internet/youtube from time to time.
That's where amazing ideas occur..
It's not engineers bruh it's niqqas with trivial knowledge because they like googling stuff during any given topic
You forgot to mention something very important. When the turbine reaches its resonant frequency. The discs start to vibrate and flex like a tuning fork, and the discs will shake themselves until failure, or they'll smash into the sides of the volute casing.
so Tesla was a Failure got it🤣🤣🤣
@SaraMorgan-ym6ue nah, everthing can be affected by resonance. its just how harmonics and resonant frequencies works. Even when you start up a regular turbine. You've gotta increase the speed in a controlled way to avoid hitting the resonant frequency. Just the consequence of that is far less bad than for a tesla turbine. I got an engineering degree and worked as a steam plant operator to know this.
@@A_Frog_from_mars12 it's ok you just need to eat a raw frog and you'll be fine💀
@SaraMorgan-ym6ue dont see how that has anything to do with vibrations that occur within a turbine. If you're gonna joke, at least make it clever. That wasn't funny, just dumb.
So a centrifugal pump impeller combines the two principles to run at slower speeds
The comments to this video from actual engineers are half the reason CZcams is such a great platform
What's the other half
@@hedonist2104LOL.
no i thought cable television was going to die. but they just brought all the awful advertising to youtube and censored almost all of my favourite content. youtube isn't great
@@pimplecentralthis
@@pimplecentralI haven’t watched an Ad on CZcams in over 3 years.
When a resisting torque is applied to a regular turbine shaft, the weight and viscosity of the fluid drive the blades. The tesla turbine relies solely on the boundary friction of the fluid so any applied torque will drastically reduce the output of the turbine. Learned all about them in fluid mechanics
You repeated exactly what he said in the video.
You regurgitated what you've been told. Learned response is all you've learned.
no he didnt he at least re-framed it. Which is more useful than your ass@@demolitionkid2
@@dookyshoes2684 no I would argue not a regurgitation, we were taught the math behind it and learned why the physics work the way they do. Engineering school is very different than learning opinions, it is learning how and why things are the way they are not being told an opinion
@@69FTWBthis guy does not seem very technically inclined. He didn't say the mechanism by which it drops twerk like you did, so you definitely were adding more info.
Dude is just r/wooshed
The reason is that they suck compared to bladed turbines, especially for hydropower. Pelton, Kaplan, and Francis turbines all reach efficiencies of >90%, are less sensitive to debris, and scale much better to large systems.
However Tesla "turbines" are regularly used as pumps for highly corrosive fluids.
Like White Knight?
Can you say more about these pumps?
@@simperinghamHave a look for "Discflo" pumps.
@@simperingham it's essentially just the opposite, a motor drives a stack of disks, pumping a fluid from the center outwards.
It's nice for cases where it's difficult to manufacture blades that withstand the liquid. For highly corrosive fluids, compatible materials (mostly glass or PTFE) are either difficult to machine or not very strong. Same for abrasive fluids, much easier to make hardened disks than hardened blades.
The other nice thing is that there are no pressure spikes and associated vibrations as the pumping action is constant.
Tesla pumps also handle any fluctuations in back pressure smoothly. You can instantly shut off the flow into or out of a Tesla pump with no problems. Do this to a turbine and there will be catastrophic problems.
As an aircraft mechanic of nearly a decade I can promise you a disk you have to pull the entire shaft out to replace is much more work than a fan blade you can unbolt
Edit: Spelling
Some fan blades are mad annoying to take out. I worked on pratt f100 220s and you had to wiggle all the blades out of a lock to just remove 1 from damage.
@Slaydur believe me brother from one fighter maintainer to another I get it. But imagine having to take the entire shaft apart just to get to a single disk. Can't imagine a segmented shaft would be fun to work with.
Why not build them as a quick change set?
Rebuild them aside and just set the complete pack in at once.
@anthonyhettinger9702 because that's A.) More expensive to replace and B.) Doesn't save any time, as the fan blades (or discs) are attached to a shaft that drives a gearbox that gives power to the rest of the plane. This in turn drives a dozen (give or take) Ops checks. So even if it was built separately you aren't saving any time, if anything building separate ones and slotting them in, then allowing a back shop to work the busted one costs more time and money (in the form of man hours at the very least).
My grandfather was a navy aircraft mechanic, and my mom said when she went to the Intrepid with him, he pointed to the planes he had worked on. I wish I knew which ones when I visited but she forgot.
Finally a good review that does not just rave about Tesla.
We use these in wastewater to pump sludge. They work pretty good for that since there's no impeller blades to get ragged up.
One would think it gets clogged up constantly due tight tolerances but if that is the case neat.
@@Hellsong89where would it need a tight tolerance? The blades don't need to be super close to each other
No, they work pretty WELL
@@edwinov no need to be pedantic. I'm just some lowlife working at a shit plant.
@@donskiverI’m normally a grammatical nit picker, but your come-back to that was totally on point.
Also - if nobody did what you do, modern society wouldn’t function, and people would be dying by the millions of easily preventable diseases. Thank you! 👏 👏 👏
The greatest flaw of the tesla turbine is that it's (too/more) efficient at higher speeds, but we don't have materials that don't deform at those speeds.
Yes we do they just want you to think we don't because they couldn't make extra money from it.
The main issue I remember learning about was actually the wear and tear from the spinning speed led to a less economically viable turbine
i went to school for water supply technology and have a degree. the water industry uses laminar flow pumps. they’re called low shear pumps in the industry and are uncommon but are used. they’re used in low speed applications so the cons of putting the discs under stress are less prevalent. they’re desirable for these applications because it’s pulsation free
This reminds me of my buddy getting his electrical degree and explaining to me why sometimes you want an AC power source converted to DC to maintain consistency in the driver or vice versa. In this case with the laminar turbine being DC and the turbulent turbine being AC.
Other turbines such as a pelton wheel are > 95% efficient but they don't have the fashionable Tesla name.
It's not really about it being fashionable, but rather just him and his inventions being well-known.
Asking why they aren't used more, when a brilliant inventor built them, is a reasonable thing to do.
@@MartinFinnerup - Why aren't turbines used more? Well in most applications they are wildly inefficient. And in the few areas where they ARE efficient enough to be applicable. there are FAR better designs than Tesla's version.
I'm sick of people and videos that don't understand technology, and make it seem like there's all kinds of ancient wisdom that is mysteriously not being used today, and would somehow be better than modern engineering and the solutions it provides.
@@MartinFinnerup Brilliant inventor is relative. From a fanboi's perspective everything Tesla touched was brilliant. From a practical perspective other people have had better ideas for most the same applications Tesla worked on. There is a mystique around Tesla that garners more... admiration than he earned.
@@reidflemingworldstoughestm1394I'd like to see how many millions of people tried thinking in terms of "energy, frequency, and vibration," and still didn't manage wireless electricity transmission in the century that has passed. Even with 2 world wars and a cold war where such a technology would change the outcomes (and money was no object).
Perhaps, just maybe, he really was just your average inventor. Although that doesn't change the fact Edison was a capitalist pig with copper mines, rubber imports, lumber companies, everything needed to wire the country end to end. And he was an ahole.
@@reidflemingworldstoughestm1394Insufferable
Slight correction here, modern hydro turbines are well above 85% efficient. Pumped hydro for instance has a round trip efficiency of about 85% and that includes the pump/motor efficiency, turbine/generator efficiency as well as head losses from turbulence and frictional losses in the pipes. Matching the turbine type (Kaplan, Francis, Pelton) and runner (turbine) blade design with the head and flow is important to ensure maximum efficiency. Similar to a pump a hydro turbine has an efficiency curve with a peak efficiency.
The other problem with the Tesla turbine is that if something gets inside that could damage the blades it'll damage all blades whereas with a regular turbine only a few blades would be likely to be damaged which means more down time with the Tesla blades and potentially more money lost.
Although, i wonder if anyone has decided to make sideways blades that also uses laminar flow at the same time and see what kind of strength and efficiencies they could get out of it.
A Francis turbine that was shown in the clip has an efficiency of ~95% today.
Yet again the comments prove that actionlab doesn't know what he's talking about
no wonder. I kept doubting why would force from frictions be better than from frontal impact. It makes no sense at all. Sure, tesla turbine is prettier and probably dyson would like it
They're still not as efficient as bladed turbines, but it's nice that he had such an effective idea
@@MrDeerbomb Tesla turbines are super effective at high speeds. Like really high speeds, so high in fact that we do not have material that could withstand them. But if we one day discover one, they would be fantasticaly usefull
@@zefir813 They also lose almost all that efficiency the moment a load is applied, which defeats the purpose of having a turbine
It's not just because of the industry being used to bladed turbines, discs would still be incredibly easy to manufacture. It's also because of scale. The Tesla turbine spins much faster than a regular turbine to extract the same energy. The issue? You can't make it large because it's own rotation would tear it to shreds. You could theoretically split up a fluid into dozens of tiny turbines, but at that point your piping increases losses and the manufacturing difficulty grows because you need more smaller discs.
What's the issue with that when they are cheap to replace?
@@StopNuclearBallisticMissle What's the issue with what? The discs tearing themselves to shreds?
@@StopNuclearBallisticMissle I think the core concept of "tearing themselves to shreds" might be the issue there chief
@@StopNuclearBallisticMissle oh I don’t know maybe it’s the rapid deconstruction of a large metal disc spinning at mach duck…. That will subsequently destroy whatever is around it
@@Pimpdaddy_payneeh, what a billion dollar dam and hundreds of human lives between friends
I used to do this with our pizza cutters with the sprayer at subway 😂
Best comment 😂😂😂
Subway sells Pizza?
@@concretesailors yeah little personal pizzas
I feel most of his designs were meant to have 0 resistance. Like using this in space might be more practical since gradual change was his goal. He also tried to make things “harmonize” together a lot so using laminar flow was low energy cost with high conversion efficiency. Guy wanted to use minimal fuel but that means it doesn’t scale or adjust to any load change
Blade turbines can have efficiency up to 98%. For example medium pressure reaction steam turbine can achieve this efficiency.
Yo DAwg, don't bring them steams peeps into this.... anyone arguing this sheets could work on any scale is straight regarded, not well regarded, but straight up re gar ded
@@gh0st_0f_b0b_chandlerYou mean disretarded?
Exactly most modern hydroelectric dams are 90% efficient. 100% efficiency is impossible partly because of mechanical fiction and if the fuild is still moving that is also lost energy.
@@gh0st_0f_b0b_chandler except “these sheets” do work as you can see in the video, they just are far from optimal for most applications though.
Anyone claiming that something just doesn’t work when it clearly does is the one who’s opinion can be disregarded. This video is talking about a concept not an actual application and there will be applications where this has advantages over other kinds of turbine. Any engineer that disregards something just saying that it wouldn’t work at any scale (especially when the design actually works) isn’t a good engineer.
@@gh0st_0f_b0b_chandler what a stupid comment
You totally ignored the biggest problem that centrifugal forces warp the discs that results in touching from the discs under extreme high speed. Results in an explosive deconstruction
ahh! Rapid Unscheduled Self dis-assembly
Make the rotors bigger in diameter, run them slower. Even the brightest dont think...
The biggest problem? No, you mean the coolest part.
@@Bysiyan mechanical destruction is the coolest part?
@@davydiver yeah not that simple, larger diameter would also significantly increase load. Running them slower lower efficiency significantly
Tesla was a very underrated scientist
Don’t fall for it
I bet you never took a course of engineering/science at any college.
It's simply because they don't allow for the transfer of power from the fluid column to the turbine itself. The whole point of a Tesla Turbine is friction at the boundary layer of the discs. But as shown in this video, when the fluid and discs are out of sync (as in the case of an applied load), turbulent flow develops which stops the formation of fluid friction at the boundary layer and therefore stops the rotation of the turbine shaft
One of the main issues is also lack of adequate torque...in other words it has speed but if u add resistance to it .its not gona be able to overcome the load...the normal turbines still can
what if it wasnt meant to add resistance, but to somehow harness the movement of the disk. Some electromagnetic voodoo?
@@randomlettersqzkebkwlike a Tesla water pump running a generator set up by Tesla in Canada?
@@randomlettersqzkebkw Harnessing is resistance, even if you have electromagnets lifting it to compensate for the weight of the load
This makes a lot more sense than, “our whole infrastructure is built on normal turbines” nonsense at the end of this vid. 😂
There is a practical size/rpm limit as well. When your turbine edge hits the speed of sound it stops working.
I remember doing the math in physics for tip speed and centrifugal loads. Forces get scary pretty quickly as the rpm and diameter increase.
Practicality always takes priority.
If that were true in this case, the Tesla turbine would be dominant cause the discs are easier to produce. The discs don't last long is the real issue here.
@@BrassBashersdid you not hear the torque problem 😂 what is wrong with you people
@@BrassBashersso are you saying that the blades not lasting very long isn't impractical?
So change the laminator flow when you hook up the turbine and you should get the same work that the Tesla coil was posted to do
* up-front pricetag
It's not only about the speed of the shaft rotation, but about torque. If you want to stop the shaft with a disc, you will, but to stop the shaft with blades you should use a lot of force
Youre talking about moment of inertia which directly depends on mass
The Tesla Turbine has a critical fail point in that it is TOO EFFECTIVE. It is remarkably easy to spin the disk, regardless of material, so fast that centripetal for rips it apart. This problem only gets worse as you scale the device up since a larger wheel equates to a larger circumference and a greater edge speed with the same RPM. The Tesla turbine is such a good design that it is physically impossible to implement. It is NOT because our infrastructure relies on blade turbines already.
You can increase the torque of a Tesla turbine without increasing the input pressure you have to increase the size of the disks.
However as the disk-size increases, centrifugal forces increase. Do you need stronger materials.
So upscaling a Tesla turbine requires more expensive materials and has an upper limit beyond that no material exists that can withstand the centrifugal forces.
Where as upscaling normal turbines is way easier without material limitation.
if your stream provides more strength than the turbine you have can convert; upscaling is not the only solution, you can also add more turbines.
& when you have many small turbine instead of a big one, when one fails you still have the other running & maintenance is way easier & cheaper.
good luck with your upscaled turbine the day it fails cause you'll find yourself without electricity & will be dependent of the manufacturer to fix it
@@unAgoristbuddy much smarter people are working with this, don't think you've discovered america 😂
@@dimitrijekrstic7567 i'm not your buddy & if you believe the banksters that control industries world wide are your friend & work for your wellbeing & freedom you're an idi0t.
theyre really not though. name one person. @@dimitrijekrstic7567
@@dimitrijekrstic7567 once you realize what toxic politics and beaurocracy deos to engineering offices. You'll be amazed at how little IQ it takes to solve problems and troubleshoot new or old technologies and concepts.
Tesla turbines are commonly used in waste treatment facilities because there's no blades for toilet paper and tampons among other items to get stuck on.
😂 I thought this comment was going a completely different way when it started.
Used in waste treatment.... where they belong😂
It's really frustrating to know that Tesla is limited by the techs of his time. Who knows what kind of world we would live in if he is alive today.
No thank you. Nikola Tesla is why some people still refuse to accept Enstein's General Relativity. Imagine if Tesla was alive today spewing his Electrical Universe nonsense.
Hence Elon Musk
modern hydro turbines can have efficiency as high as 95%
E
The Pelton wheel, is the current, prize turbine. The Tesla turbine is perfect for certain applications.
There is a general rule in nature, higher the coefficient of efficiency, lower the power. you can see if from Stirling engines, to rocket propulsion systems.
So, the same applies for turbines
Tesla turbines are limited by the strength of the material used to make the disk. If the disk spins too fast, it could deform or even break apart inside the housing.
This drawback affects operating speeds and pump sizes.
i heard these turbines need to spin insanely fast for them to be viable so they arent useful when you only have a slow moving force to turn them or they'd need alot of gear reduction
High RPM low torque
I'd heard similar:
Tesla Turbines also spin too fast, and it's much harder to build one that can handle the internal stresses of spinning that fast. And if it's not spinning fast enough, it doesn't have a high efficiency.
Too much gear reduction to achieve working torque. Immediately adds increased friction & increased mass overcoming any gained reduction torque.
it's a bit like rotary engines. they are by design able to spin fast with perfect balance but are not efficien't and low torque.
you can make a slow one but it won't perform nearly as good as traditional turbines
@@stringbender3this is exactly the opposite of what it does. A turbine is based on the relation of torque correlation with velocity difference. Velocity difference caused by load. And power based on surface area times force applied.
The Tesla has very high surface area, and high speed media would induce a massive torque when the turbine is stationary.
When it comes to rpm, you just about divide the media speed by the radius. Tip speed ~ media speed. Make the turbine larger diameter to lower rpm.
A regular turbine stage doesn't have 60% efficiency though. It's more like 90%. But it could depend on what you are using to compare.
Pretty much like the ones used in oil burning steam turbine Electricity making powerplants!
90% when you add in regeneration.
@@Dan-gs3kg I am talking about the turbine stage's efficiency not the entire power plant's.
Friction, and Gravity, decided to introduce themselves 😂
Name a carrot a Tesla carrot and it becomes oh so special.
What do you mean by this?
🤦🏻♂️
I looked at a water mill turbine on CZcams over a hundred years old. The was a moveable section to wrap tighter to or away from the turbine feeding the water into the Turbine blades and the outlet left through a vertical pipe and fell into the river. The weight of the water leaving through the tube was pulling the water. The Turbine was pushed by the water coming in and pulled by the water leaving. The size was not that large and it replaced a very large water wheel. It had not been apart in 100 years but still worked, the bearings and seals where external. It was simply unbolted the worn part damaged by water flow over 100 years repaired and re-assembled. The moveable section was a throttle for the turbine just like on a modern day variable geometry turbo on a car engine but simpler. Smart people move humans along.
Hi, could you send me the link, please?
Hi, could you send me the link, please?
Yeah, I want the link too!
Like a lot of Tesla stuff: neat idea, but impractical.
Except it IS practical but for pumping. Tesla pumps run very smoothly and are resistant to clogging.
@@chaotixthefox this video is about TURBINES, as such it is absolutely impractical.
@@TheLumberjack1987it's not impractical. It's not aligned With the agenda.
@@diegoschwaderer398 lmao what agenda?
The "disk rotating at 25k rpm exploding after 5 seconds" agenda?
There's not material in the world that could withstand such forces, that's why tesla turbines are not used.
Agenda he says, what a clown.
@@TheLumberjack1987some turbines could be used in reverse to pump fluids. Doesn't sound impractical for this one because it's simply a disk
A turbine's efficiency is defined by its ability to extract kinetic energy of the fluid. It becomes maximal when the exit speed of the fluid is minimal, over a maximally large exit area.
Therefore the Tesla design is suboptimal.
A large failing of the Tesla turbine is the materials required to make a disc that truly benefits from laminar flow doesn’t exist. It must be resistant to any deformation throughout the disc, light enough to not apply extra drag to the liquid that is propelling the disc, and must not swell or compress because laminar flow has a very narrow range of tolerance. Striking the housing or other discs will annihilate the efficiency, of course. Even our best meta materials found today can’t meet the standards required for a Tesla turbine to reach those theoretical efficiency levels.
Problem is we build the turbine then apply a load. We should build the turbine to the load capacity.
Standard Tesla concept, great in a scientific environment with absolute control over the variables, but terrible in a real world situation.
But he has a cult following with a certain sort.
Except, of course, for polyphase induction motors.
There's also some materials-science limitations, the blades move really fast, and if they start to wobble, they can warp or shatter. Solutions to this can be found, sure, but Tesla lived and worked before many modern materials were invented.
The reality is that without any resistance there is no way to apply any torque and thusly the turbine can seize very easily. It is also useless in any sort of high torque application which is essentially all kinetic applications. Perhaps it could succeed as a generator with a set rpm and load.
right!
put it in a miata
what?
Compresed air swap Miata when?
@@Enter-wl3zf Miatas are small so for enthusiasts, as a joke, when they see small power sources or RC scale v8 engines they say 'put it in a miata' as if it's an upgrade
ah ok :) i actually drive a miata but didn’t see any use for a tesla turbine. Thats why I was confused @@chrismofer
you’re thinking on the same brainwaves as me
Not sure on these facts but I heard the discs need to be made at a 2m diameter and spin something crazy like 27,000 rpm to make an efficient turbine to replace current power supply stations. And no one has even come close to making a disc that size without it shattering
I'm not an expert but if you could spin 2m diameter disc at 27000rpm, the energy amount of inertia would be very high, and probably a power plant would be possible.
@@shaakenbake I think it does replace a plant, there is some math out there for it and it's currently impossible
@@shaakenbake "if you could spin 2m diameter disc at 27000rpm" that IF is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, physics apply no matter how great an idea look on paper.
There's no material in the world (and maybe never) which can withstand such forces, especially not if it has to work 24/7 for years.
@@TheLumberjack1987 Especially considering you'd need a huge gearbox to get those 27000 RPM down to something useable, probably in the 1000-3000 RPM range. The friction in a ca. 1:100 gear box would be enough to make this design less efficient than turbines we have today. And the wear would be incredibly expensive. You'd probably have to replace all the bearings yearly and reliability would be a huge issue. The reality for engineers is that spinning fast is often a bad thing, and the turbine alone doesn't make a powerplant.
@@planterion7969 exactly, but remember, Tesla was the second coming of lightning christ, so we're not using his inventions because of some vague satanic/woke agenda according to his fanboys....
There's a sweet spot where it can be 100% efficient at a certain fluid speed
There’s a few reasons why this doesn’t work. One reason is the pressure it puts on the bearings when the air or fluid has to escape through the middle. It puts too much pressure, heat, and friction on the bearing. See the comment section for the real expert opinion.
Also normal turbines can have variable vanes that provide torque for startup.
One thing that might confuse viewers is that some turbines use energy to move air or water like a jet turbine or jetski/jetboat impeller.
Torque is the key. However, gearing down from 20,000 rpm to 1000 torque can be manipulated
I would say the bigger issue is that if you build a true Tesla Turbine at scale there is no material on earth you can use to make the discs without the rotational force ripping them apart.
Yes there is man what kind of universe do you think we live in? Nothing is finite remember that.
I am not able to see your comment but I think it has something to do with vibration playing a part. In a true and perfect tesla turbine vibrations would be a consequence of imperfections and imperfect rotational force.
The Tesla Turbine has another major advantage that makes them essential for certain use cases. That being that there is an uninterrupted clear flow from input to output such that any solid contaminant smaller than the gap between disks can pass unimpeded.
Thus for things like pumping drainage water where other pumps can clog, designs like the Tesla Turbine don't.
Al Bundy has entered the chat.
@@ATEC101 Not very up to date on things, are you?
Look up Tesla Disk Pumps. There's a huge market for them in industrial applications, so someone is making bank, and it's not you.
Turbulence in a turbine? unheard of.
The idea is applying force on the circumference of the wheel which we already do in case of gearbox, potters wheels, train wheels etc.
The one thing not mentioned that is a huge advantage of a Tesla turbine is the fact it has nearly zero pump pulsing and can be great for applications requiring laminar flow.
No Torque.
"oh shit Teslas adding turbos now"
Watches short: oh
I like how even when it failed it was still better than what was already in use
Man, Tesla truly was so ahead of his time
Really interesting video, thanks. Also, a consideration for issues with the tesla turbine is the sensitive stall speed, and also the higher rotational masses as compared to axial flow turbines for thermal plant.
If the Tesla turbine actually worked as intended, then manufacturers would have adopted this design over the more difficult and expensive to manufacture turbines. If there is one thing that manufacturers desire, it is making products at lower cost to increase profits.
The primary reason for Tesla's turbine not being widely adopted is that it isn't efficient under load. The efficiency of Tesla's design decreases as the load on the shaft increases. There are other problems, such as the risk of clogging.
All this is bs
Like guy on video said all infrastructure were build on traditional turbines
Tesla stated his turbines didn’t have torque and were not more efficient unless they were hooked together in series, I assume he meant harnessing the exhaust from one and feeding another that was attached to the same shaft. I’d love to see someone do this to confirm if there is more torque and efficiency
Bro re-invented the turbine and it was a good shot. Cant win them all .
Reduction gearboxes? Literally it is the reduction of resistance at the cost of output speed
It doesn't solve the problem. To get power from the turbine, you need to load it's shaft with a torque. You can get higher torque after a gearbox but the turbine still needs to have a certain torque. This has been studied since many years and it's not out of stupidity that bladed turbines are used the most, it's because they are more efficient.
Do you know how much friction and wear gear boxes have? Even if these had 100% efficiency, a gearbox that would have the ratio to make this able to turn a generator ot sth without stalling would have enough friction to bring the efficiency below something like a modern pelton turbine.
@@planterion7969 planetary gearboxes actually have little to no friction when correctly constructed
They say Tesla never got the full credit for electricity, but Elon Musk had something else to say about that!
Tesla has to be one of the most brilliant inventors of our race to ever live.
He's still pretty much invented AC so I think he is certainly left his mark anyway
...and what does that have to do with the subject of this video?
Did you really just credit Tesla with inventing AC????
So we're just ignoring Faraday and Blathy and Stanely???
You know, the guys that can actually be credited with it? Just going with the pidgeon f#^$&, eh?
he helped to democratize AC, but he did not invent it
Nikola Tesla has the biggest cult folllowing of people who have 0 clue about science or engineering. Michael Faraday was the firs person to demonstrate AC, nobody invented it.
Tesla is just a pure genius
Danny is a true middle schooler at heart
You also need turbine pumps to physically lift liquids to higher points, preferably with a backflow device. Discs cand overcome that type of head pressure. Cool idea, almost too efficient in a gravity setting like a water dam. Can’t keep up with the rpms and warps the shaft.
WE WILL NEVER FORGET ABOUT YOU NIKOLA TESLA!! 😢
These are best utilized in magnetically neutral or "zero gravity" applications. The speed is required for properly propelling magnetic fields. This is also efficient and effective for gyroscopically stabilized platforms. Like a space port
But what about applications where you don’t have scizophrenia or in applications where the individual has an IQ above 80?
@@maseratidyce3587 Woah, where did that came from?
Oh boy. This is literally what I do for a living, missed a few points.
1) Metallurgy sucked when we built most of our steam turbines were built, so good luck making a large turbine. We didn’t get away from interference fit disks until ~1980s due to this.
2) it’s soooo much cheaper to swap blades due to FOD damage, fatigue cracking due to condenser back pressure events, grid disturbances etc. I couldn’t imagine having a spare disk on hand.
3) Creep…after a few years of service you’ll for sure impact your inner cylinder.
List keeps going
Man, just a bad idea over all at large scale
Doesn’t mean we can’t retrofit them in. Specially if the back end as well as front end is cheeper even after the modifications to fit it. And yes I get they are not for every application but there are plenty they could be. Specially ones that when at full open the torque load drops off. But repairs and maintenance on these as well as I’m betting life and reliability are higher than the more complex impeller systems.
Which one needs more space for the some power? The blades are wider, but the TT might need more discs?
and thats where the issue starts, the tesla turbine needs to be much larger and spin much faster to generate the same amount of torque, so much so that youd need some very expensive engineering to have it not rip itself apart
Tesla just showed us how to fix that issue, but that doesn't mean it would work for other purposes but he was successful.
I’m thinking- car engine- use air pressure from vacuum intake
Not only exhaust
1/2 &1/2
I love the design, and the concept, tesla was way ahead of his time, and he was all about efficiency and harmony, yes his design is flawed compared to modern day turbines but if you ran these in a series I do think they would be more economical, especially with more development into improvments to the design, you see the main issue is money, and big manufacturers want money for their products, if we all went to using these types of concepts from Tesla designs I feel like eventually there wouldnt be much money to make because of how they are built and used, it would be vastly cheaper due to simplicity, this is kind of the same argument as to why we just dont build nuclear power plants instead of wind energy farms, 1 power plant takes up way less space, provides much more power, and is guaranteed rain or shine, or hear me out we can build a couple big ass tesla towers in every state and see how that goes lol, free energy from static electricity naturally in our atmosphere because the earth is a giant geo electric magnet...Would take lots of copper windings though...just saying I really have to ask how bad are tesla designs compared to modern designs when we all know we can obviously improve on them given enough time and money and braincells, he gave us completely free energy eons ago, why havent we built upon those designs today??? Why did the government take all of his documents and designs and lock them away??? Why are there laws against us people putting our own free energy systems in place at our homes on our properties we pay for??? It's all bullshite if you ask me...If all you engineer's were told right now to build us a tesla turbine that's on par or better than we have now would you shy away from the task and contract??? I'm not saying his designs are the best or better just that he was truly onto something and I believe with todays technology we can make them even better, how about an arc reactor please lol...
Fluid pumps are made this way. Particulates in the fluid cause much less wear on the interior surfaces.
Super heated air (combustion) spins modern turbines. Solid turbines can't cool off.
Fair point
Depends entirely on the application, you are thinking only of a jet engine or a turbocharger. "Modern turbines" are also driven by steam and by cold water.
Sure it can. Just design it to do that
In one of my engineering classes these were brought up, aparrently they dont scale up very well, and to make one large enough to create useful amou ts of power you would be pushing the limits of current metals, they create so much centrifugal force the disks blow themselves apart, thats why tesla gave up on the design once he discovered they just cant be scaled up to a usable size, there are a ton of very innovative engine designs that work great at small sizes but dont really work when made big enough to be really usable, like the little steam pop pop boats, saw one a guy built big enough to run a row boat but even at that size it was getting pretty sketchy
Bladed turbines I can only imagine create more torque. Discs will allow more slipping under a load.
It's not just about RPM, pressure plays a part in practicality.
Only Tesla could invent a turbine without the turb.
so its just an "ine"?
@@nitehawk86
He heard it through the grape ine. 😄
A laminine
@@mikeoxmall69420
Laminine = 9 lamas
"... but I will bet a silk pyjama
You'll never see a three-L lllama."
@@nitehawk86 a disckine
Bro gotta go back to his pigeon 😂
I'm imagining an alternate universe where many of Tesla's innovations were adopted and became standard and we'd all be living in futuristic cities with flying cars right now.
I saw a video where a guy built one and with only 20psi of air it generated over 2,000 watts and can run 120 or 210 volts
It's still a pretty neat idea that is a testament to Tesla's genius.
Money talks, the rule of any business - unfortunately for the engineers, mathematicians, physicists and any tecnical nerd among us!🤓
You have a child’s level of comprehension about how any of this works. Tesla turbines are regularly used as pumps when the application calls for it. This isn’t some tech that got buried. **Engineers** determined there are usually better options.
It’s literally not about the money it’s about the fact that these don’t work great as turbines. Especially modern ones with upper 90 percentile range of efficiency
With this idea of a turbine you can put motors onto the insides of floats like lap pool lane dividers and string them across a river to generate electricity with minimal resistance. It also has less impact on the generators
Fun fact: Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla were both arch rivals. Ever since Tesla had his amazing ideas, Edison would get jealous and dismiss his plans.
Tesla had a lot of rivals, Einstein was a bigger rival than Edison.
@@MartinWasTaken huh! Never knew Einstein was in the mix as well…
Finally somebody who doesnt think laminar flow is "frozen"water coming out of a balloon
It's a brilliant idea, we just haven't worked out how to make it work. In the future they will be the norm
Unfortunately for your fantasies thats just not true, the reason they arent used is they provide much lower torque at the same sized as other turbines used. They are impractical and even at best would only end up about as efficient but much more expensive than current offerings
@@stephenallen4635 Well, not entirely true. We can increase the torque with some clever engineering.
Like, you could make the end of the beam itself part of an electric motor, so the spinning of the rod will create electricity directly. This bypasses a lot of the initial torque issues.
The main problem is that even with increased torque, a similar shaped "normal" turbine outputs more electricity. Since 60% efficiency into a generator that is twice as big, gives more electricity.
@@Predated2 Well from an engineering standpoint, if you wanted to make this a direct drive to the generator, you'd need a generator that can take insane RPMs. (As mentioned in the video,) to be in any way efficient, Tesla turbines need very high RPM. It's already hard to make the disks that can take those RPMs at industrial scale, never mind a complex and heavy device like a generator. You'd need to gear it down significantly to make it useful, introducing enough drag to make it less efficient than competitors and enough wear to make maintenance very expensive and reliability low. Things spinning fast isn't something we want, same reason we're trying to remove gearboxes from wind turbines so the generators can spin slower. That can extend their life by 20 times.
Friction wearing (including bearings) is less on modern turbines. Given that the power output is almost the same, the cost effectiveness of the Tesla turbine is less.
No the reason these never took off is because under the load we need them to run at, which is much higher than in your video - the disks warp after a very relatively short period of time, which would result in frequent replacement, downtime, and a much higher chance of failure during production use.
And since turbines are found very commonly in aircrafts that are obliterated if they crash, the higher efficiency, but also much higher wear rate isn't sustainable for commercial use.
Thicker disks would technically allow for higher RPMs but in the end the forces win and the same warping would occur.
Another example of tesla being disrespected despite his amazing inventions
Because most of his stuff were made to work in lab conditions.
Jessus Christ ... how many so called experts are here ...
There are over 8 billion people on the planet. Roughly 10-20 million of them at least are engineers.