Internet search results don't give much results of real life examples of bladeless turbine. Has anyone ever seen a working real example of Tesla's bladeless turbine, in some industrial or other application? How did it perform? What was the application?
Marino
An inspection of his patent reveals that his pump relies on the viscosity of the fluid to perform work- that is, the fluid is coupled to the impelling cylinder by shear forces alone. This means the fluid being pumped is being strongly sheared whenever the pump is running, and this inevitably produces significant frictional losses.
There are many other ways of pumping fluid in which the pumping forces are not generated by viscosity, and hence will not suffer the efficiency losses of Tesla's scheme.
The overall efficiency limit of this thermodynamic process can be accurately determined by calculating the carnot efficiency for the process, which limit holds regardless of the details of the process steps. This is given by:
Carnot efficiency =
(source temperature - sink temperature)/(source temperature * sink temperature)
where the source temperature is the temperature of the "hot side" of the cycle and the sink temperature is the temperature at which the cycle dumps its waste heat. All temperatures are in degrees absolute (Kelvin).
Yes, we are working on creating a new type of power supply using cold steam and negative pressure. There are two tanks with a Tesla turbine between them. The links between the tanks are evacuated to 25 inches of mercury (0.85 bar) with water in the primary tank that boils rapidly and the steam passes through the turbine to produce mechanical energy such as would be applied to standard steam turbines. The difference is that this system has one moving part and can operate bearingless almost regardless of the turbine mass.
The peak performance turbine output unloaded is estimated at 1kW. So a thousand of these would generate 1 MW but there are plans underway to increase efficiency and tank volume adding disk size to nozzle ratios to discover the best output configuration.
I suspect that a ratchet-type centrifugal clutch flywheel may help with fluctuations in output.
I have asked some questions regarding this turbine.
