Nikola Tesla was so great a scientist thatto truly appreciate the scale of his discoveries to humanity is yet to come. Most of his inventions, which are still legendary, concern the possibility of transmitting electrical energy over a distance. However, among the patents, and there are many more than a thousand of them, which this outstanding theorist and experimenter-practitioner received, there are others that relate exclusively to the mechanical units 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.
Every invention must be unique, suchmodern rules of patent registration, they were in 1913, when the great scientist received another copyright certificate. The originality of Tesla's invention consists in the absence of blades with which the rotor of almost any turbine is supplied. The kinetic energy of the air flow, or any other gas, is transmitted not by 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 discs. The Tesla turbine uses such a property of gases as their viscosity.
All the inventions of this extraordinary personvery beautiful. The Tesla Turbine is no exception. Her beauty is in simplicity, not in primitiveness, but precisely in that refined brevity, which has become the hand of genius. It has never occurred to anyone before to unwind the disk with a stream of gas directed in the same plane with it.
Of course, to increase the efficiency of alldevices should increase the number of disks and minimize the distance between them, so the Tesla turbine is a rotor mounted on a drive shaft consisting of many flat "plates", and the stator is the space in which this shaft rotates with nozzles directed tangentially, i.e. perpendicular to the radius of the rotor discs. This design gives 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 output, and the entire turbine will begin to rotate in the reverse direction.
Еще одно преимущество – в характере движения gas, it is laminar, that is, it does not create vortex flows, to overcome which consumes useful energy, and with which the designers of turbines are struggling so hard. In general, at the time when Tesla invented his own turbine, the engineers had many problems with materials for the manufacture of blades, so he figured out how to do without them.
There is a design and its drawbacks.These include the low gas flow rate at which the Tesla turbine is efficient. However, this in no way diminishes the significance of this invention, which may suddenly be needed and become simply an irreplaceable solution of a technical problem, as it happened with other N. Tesla patents.
Simplicity of design - obvious quality,which has a Tesla turbine. It is possible to make it with your own hands, however, this still requires considerable qualification and high precision in all the works. After all, the quality of the discs and the small gap between them, which should be very uniform, as well as the casing with nozzles with the help of simple tools, is practically impossible.
