Tesla turbines are not used because when we have disks that are rotating very fast, there is a high chance that they tend to warp. This means we need to use special materials, which again increases cost…

The brilliance of Tesla's turbine is he took one of the problems of a conventional turbine, molecular adhesion on the blades, and made it part of the solution. This approach of harnessing the problem directly to the solution was a constant in his designs.

Your correct, everything needs to be tuned properly. That's something I've learned over the years, and I haven't had any issues with warping. My latest turbine uses fiberglass disks, that have an extremely high strength to weight ratio and I don't experience any warping. Also there isn't any issues with torque either. Thanks for making an accurate video about tesla turbines.

In the wine industry, I was amazed to see a Tesla turbine used as a wine pump. This was in 2008 at Frey Winery (Redwood Valley, California.) The Frey family are MIT level geniuses who are happy just making wine. They were using Tesla turbines as reversible wine pumps long before the Internet got fascinated with them -- and have been using the design in a practical manner for decades.

One of the other things that limits their adoption now is that with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) traditional turbines can be designed to be hyper optimized for their use cases, in some ways taking advantage of the very principles the tesla turbine exclusively operates on. A great example is the modern steam turbines that are installed into thermal power plants. they almost look like a hybrid of the tesla turbine and a standard jet engine compressor.

Nikola Tesla was ahead of his time... Great man to learn from

Thanks for all your videos. I love how you explain things in a simplistic way.

The good thing about Tesla turbine is its efficiency is 97% but it has low volume density. Means, at same power load, it requires a huge volume. In industry, a lower efficiency but compact size is preferred.

A key feature that was not emphasized was the path of the gas. The gas moving at the outer circumference of the disk will rotate the disk at aproximately its same velocity. But as the gas spirals inwardly before exiting, the radius and circumference of the disk are shorter, causing the disk to spin faster. I suggest that the overall rotation is some function of the gas velocity, the entrance radius and the exit radius.

In the explanation you missed one of the coolest aspects of the Tesla turbine. He uses the principle of conservation of angular momentum and it kind of self induction Loop a bit the way Tesla coil uses the voltage gain earlier in the coil to create a step up later in the coil which creates a voltage draw that increases the voltage earlier in the coil in a runaway self-amplification of voltage. In particular, any unit massive fluid towards the outside of the turbine has to increase its angular velocity as it approaches the center to conserve angular momentum, as it increases its angular velocity the speed differential between the center of the turbine and the fluid is increased driving the center harder causing the the turbine to rotate faster which in turn accelerates the fluid at the edge of the turbine so that it gains angular momentum, which start the cycle all over again. It's a self-inducing system that maximizes the frictional transfer between the fluid and the disc. The fundamental problem that I see with the design is that as it spins faster to keep the liquid moving in a circle you need higher and higher centripetal force which creates a high pressure around the edges, putting a lot of friction and pressure on any seal you have between the disc and the stationary housing

I would like to add a minor correction , sort of, we do use tesla turbines but as pumps , they are commonly used in industry for fluid pumps of volatile fluids like oil. great video overall though.

This is the technology used in the DISCFLO centrifugal pump. Great idea, great solution for many pumping applications. The downside is that the money you save in maintenance is eaten up by the electricity required to move the pumped fluid. If you need a fish ladder next to a hydroelectric dam, this pump can actually pump fish without harming them!

We do use teslaturbines where ever there is a highly viscous fluid that needs to be driving a turbine! We do this all the time. Would use it for less viscous fluids/gases like water or air IF it would be possible to run big Teslaturbine disks of a few meters in diameter on several 10k or 30k rpm....yet there is no material out there today that can survive these stresses.

We actually did the Tesla turbine as our project yet got rejected and this was mostly cuz of lecturers having no idea of it's working and they think getting 3.2 k rpm is an easy task using a inexpensive air blower and a bunch of DVD discs

Built one some years ago from old computer hard disc drives. Stripped the platters from the drives, drilled central air exit holes close to their centers and stacked them (6 off) back in one of the drives with 0.5mm spacing between each platter. Used plastibond to shape the interior of the drive casing to have very small clearances between the disc outer edges and the casing and the outer faces of the disk stack. Used a 1.2mm mig welder tip as a air nozzle. Ran of 120psi air compressor. Sounded like a jet engine spooling up, measured rpm at 22000rpm. One problem tesla had was the turbine was capable of running at such high rpm that the disk materials of the day couldn't cope with the loads. I ran mine from a safe distance.

I'm curious about cavitation, they work for heaters, instant steam generators. But ive read somewhere that it also helps with aerodynamics. A vehical with golfball size indents spaced an inch apart all over the car will supposedly more aerodynamic because it's ability to resist air friction by using its own cavitational eddy throughout the entire surface. Thus allowing air to flow against air with the boundry of that cavitation air/sound?.. Theoretically speaking it will only show larger improvements upon higher speeds. Research is hard to find on this subject matter, I'd test it myself if i had time and $. Thank you for your video content, i enjoy it very much!

Funny you should show a Blendtech Blender. In one of my first jobs out of uni, I had to investigate why these blenders various programmed modes weren't running for the expected time when used in Australia. Long story short, the firmware incorporated the AC supply frequency in their timing calculations and it had been hard coded to 60Hz. While doing some MTBF testing on them, I found when used repeatedly, with little break inbetween cycles, the metal blades were conducting heat from the motor into the jug, boiling the liquid medium inside. Will it blend? Sure. It can cook too!

2:04 "laminar flow" Destin pops his head around the corner and says "whoo!"

That appears to be a Fitz I-X-L Steel Overshoot Waterwheel a few seconds in. It also appears to have faulty feedstock. A properly designed, constructed, and operated overshot/overshoot is very efficient - 88% to 97% energy conversion.

That was excellent. I finally fully understand the Tesla turbine

Keep making awesome science videos man!

Imagine 100 years of using tesla turbines, with constant updates and improvements...

masterful. super simplified. thanks

Thank you! You could have measured air temperature at various places to show that there is little warming.

I love the effort and love for Tesla turbines but I really wish these multi million subscriber channels would actually do their homework on the TesTurs before making a video telling people entirely inaccurate things about the working machinations of the TesTurs… Despite what everyone erroneously claims about TesTurs, chasing high RPMs is exactly why nobody makes Tesla turbines that actually work. That’s NOT how they are supposed to be run in the first place. TesTurs output PLENTY of torque and power even at low rpms. Efficiency is actually increased by reducing slip. Increasing the disc speed does nothing to reduce the slip, only increase the distance the fluid could slip across the disc which doesn’t increase efficiency. Just listen to what Tesla says to do, 1) increase the fluid speed relative to. the discs (not high speed disc) 2) increase surface area. 3) decrease the disc spacing. “Owing to a number of causes affecting the performance, it is difficult to frame a precise rule which would be generally applicable, but it may be stated that within certain limits, and other conditions being the same, the torque is directly proportionate to the square of the velocity of the fluid relatively to the runner and to the effective area of the disks and, inversely, to the distance separating them. The machine will, generally, perform its maximum work when the effective speed of the runner is one-half of that of the fluid; but to attain the highest economy, the relative speed or slip, for any given performance, should be as small as possible. This condition may be to any desired degree approximated by increasing the active area of and reducing the space between the disks.” -Nikola Tesla Increasing disc speed only increases efficiency at the cost of power because of the centrifugal head as you increase the rpm, it counters the incoming fluid flow. “Still another valuable and probably unique quality of such motors or prime movers may be described. By proper construction and observance of working conditions the centrifugal pressure, opposing the passage of the fluid, may, as already indicated, be made nearly equal to the pressure of supply when the machine is running idle. If the inlet section be large, small changes in the speed of revolution will produce great differences in flow which are further enhanced by the concomitant variations in the length of the spiral path. A self-regulating machine is thus obtained bearing a striking resemblance to a direct-current electric motor in this respect that, with great differences of impressed pressure in a wide open channel the flow of the fluid through the same is prevented by virtue of rotation. Since the centrifugal head increases as the square of the revolutions, or even more rapidly, and with modern high grade steel great peripheral velocities are practicable, it is possible to attain that condition in a single stage machine, more readily if the runner be of large diameter. Obviously this problem is facilitated by compounding, as will be understood by those skilled in the art. Irrespective of its bearing on economy, this tendency which is, to a degree, common to motors of the above description, is of special advantage in the operation of large units, as it affords a safeguard against running away and destruction. Besides these, such a prime mover possesses many other advantages, both constructive and operative. It is simple, light and compact, subject to but little wear, cheap and exceptionally easy to manufacture as small clearances and accurate milling work are not essential to good performance. In operation it is reliable, there being no valves, sliding contacts or troublesome vanes. It is almost free of windage, largely independent of nozzle efficiency and suitable for high as well as for low fluid velocities and speeds of revolution.” -Nikola Tesla The only time you want to spin the turbine fast is when it’s being used as a pump/compressor, because ALL centrifugal pumps’/compressors’ performance is tip speed dependent. “I have found that the quantity of fluid propelled in this manner, is, other conditions being equal, approximately proportionate to the active surface of the runner and to its effective speed. For this reason, the performance of such machines augments at an exceedingly high rate with the increase of their size and speed of revolution.” -Nikola Tesla Does no one actually read the patents before they go and try to tell people how the turbine actually works?!? 🤦‍♂️

The big problem I see with them is that they look very sensitive to vibrations. Even a small feedback loop or stray vibration could cause the disks to rub against each other in a scaled up model.

Did this with tuned magnetic disks. Didn't get warping or wobble at 45cm on the edges. Machining was a nightmare, and we had a really boring teacher so I lost interest in project. But the disks did work.

I love these videos. You and integza are the best. Do it again but keep the same width discs and give them a much greater diameter. And to avoid losses when a load is applied use a flywheel maybe! Please!

The main factor in why we don’t use Tesla turbines is that material science hadn’t reached a point that allowed for discs to spin at such high RPM without self-destruction. 👍🏼 Enjoy your videos.

you can't post anything on the internet without getting swarmed by people desperately trying to convince you otherwise. no matter what it is, if you post something on the internet, you're categorical and entirely wrong.

That's the best explanation I've heard on what problems they face and why they aren't used in industry.

For large scale industrial applications material strength becomes an issue as the discs are unable to be prevented from warping. Though they work well in smaller applications.

Charlie Solis is definitely going to be disappointed with this video when he has Tesla Turbines that actually work 😮‍💨 If you don’t know, now you know.

The only question I have for you is which one would you personally prefer to use in your own turbines if you had them?

Very lucidly explained. 👍

The thing I love about this invention is it is soooo tesla. The ability to have the turbine work in reverse is something he made use of in his electric devices. He looked at the water and was like, "you're gonna pretend to be electricity.;" and water being water, it didn't disagree...

I built a tracking, concentrating solar collector, which makes steam and I run that against a brass gear on a good bearing with a generator at the other end. Couldn't be simpler. Works like a champ.

There has to be some market and adoption of Tesla turbines. Was there any research on this point before publishing the vid? I’m curious. I would like to know some examples of where they’re used, when they were updated from earlier turbines, etc.

Does porting the turbine plates in the middle, and subsequently creating the mentioned spiral path, then create a situation where the outer edges of the plates are moving faster than the middle, preventing your turbine from ever achieving this laminar flow you described? It seems like it would be impossible to stabilize the fluid speed versus a gradient of speeds across the width of the plates.

Boss your a Fun Educator. Keep'em Thinking and Exploring, Good Stuff. 🤝

I hope someone actually makes a tesla turbine jet engine one day, it could be the future of flying planes & to generate electricity.

It seems these may be beneficial if used simply for storing energy with mechanisms to ensure the load is constant and the flow-rate:RPM is managed properly. Definitely may even get more broad applications way into the future when specialized materials may be more common and/or less expensive. But who knows!?!?

This was very interesting. Thank you for posting this.

I wonder what the size limit of an efficient tesla turbine is before the centrifugal force would tear it apart. Also, the effect of the boundary layer is used in viscous couplers. It looks similar to a tesla turbine without the in and outlets.

Not to mention that we already have hydro generators that are over 90% efficient today.

The explanation in the last few seconds for why they aren't used amounts to, "Eh, we just don't do it that way."

Could you do a video about battery technology?

Thanks. Great explanation

I learned about tesla turbines recently and was wondering why they weren't in use. Thanks for making this video!

How can turbines have 35% loss if pumped storage hydroelectricity has a full-cycle efficiency of 70 to 80% and even higher ?

don't forget that the material needed to make a 60' diam disc needs to be resistant or immune to blade wobble at high rpm. thats another reason they are not used. the ones built to scale back then destroyed themselves due to high rpm wobble

What might increase the efficiency a bit more is some kind of surface shape that would promote laminar flow even more - some kind of grooves along the path of the fluid. It might not be possible though - just a wild shot in the dark. Still, the problem of load put on the turbine decreasing the efficiency is something that cannot be resolved - this kind of turbine has very little torque when we want to maximize efficiency.

Can I just say, your videos, are great.

Can they be made more efficient for a fixed load (for example charging a battery with constant current)?

If you make some modifications you can make it a vortex tube. Try making a video on it, it's functioning is very interesting

This was really interesting thank you!

Always excited to learn new things from you! Great channel!

I love this channel. I learn a bunch of stuff.

amazing channel. liked subbed, applause and congratulations

Since the pumped material does not impinge normally on the disks it can be a carborundum slurry or even concrete aggregate. There is vey little wear in the disks.

"The past might be there's but the future is mine" -nikola tesla

with carbon fibre or even carbontanium tuned discs and modern precision CNC processes the efficiency will be so much higher than 65%. i have thought for a while that this needed to be looked at again , Tesla was so far ahead of his era's technology it is unreal.

Actually it is not the laminar flow that is responsible for the working of a TT, it is the turbulence in the boundary layer. It is the turbulence, in the portion of he boundary layer, that transfers power from the fluid having mostly laminar flow, in middle of the inter disk space, to the disk surfaces. In addition, it is that turbulence layer, which increases with the increment of the differential speed, between the fluid and the disks, that creates negative pressure and sucks (as described by Dr. Robert D. Hunt in his "Drag sucks" ) the disks strongly towards the inter-disk spaces (behaves something like magnetic lock), which allows the turbine to create its torque. And all these things even do not take in to account the thermodynamic characteristics of the fluid, which change as the fluid swirls in the inter-disk spacing. In short TT, in spite of its simplicity is a very complex thermodynamic transformer that should be studied via real world models, instead of relying on standard postulates, many of which are frankly, very miss understood (as Dr. Hunt also notes).

Also if you make a large disk spin very fast, the edge speed of it will eventually break barriers you do not want to break ;) Like moving air past the speed of sound.

So, I just read an article about reversing the charge on a rusty battery takes the rust off? I'd love to see a demonstration of this on your channel!

Intresting video 👍 I would just like to point out that modern water turbines have efficiencies in the region of 95 to 98% as you have show a water turbine at the start. For gas turbines this might be signifficantly lower.

The real problem with these was when you get something of that size and scale close to a large car in size and weight spinning at 3500 RPM the structure itself starts to tear itself apart. Same can be seen with CD's if you spin them too fast they will literally just explode. The consensus was we do not have the materials at this time required to efficiently make disks that can withstand the forces.

I'm currently eyeballing a stack of old hard drive platters on the desk thinking that they don't have much in the way of small imperfections. (starts to giggle)

What happens to the efficiency when you put a load on the shaft, like a generator?

Do more Tesla stuff!

Please shoot me a link to the turbine used.. I didn’t see it in the description

The Tesla turbine, in order to approximate the efficiency of a standard blade turbine, require to turn at 100K rpm with a constant load applied; they all require a gearbox at the output to reduce the rpm and increase the torque. Today as 80 years ago, there is no type of steel or other alloy that can spin at 100K rpm without shattering. Tesla used to reduce the output speed at 10K rpm, but at that speed the efficiency of the turbine is in the single digit range. Notwithstanding all the interest in a working Tesla turbine, they were - and remain - a gimmick...

With new materials being discovered and people learning how to make them, I think the Tesla turbines will be able to get to speeds we never thought possible. (like graphene, borophene and others). Some might be lighter and stronger and could even have better properties to make them more efficient (and changes to the design, like combustion engines being redesigned for more power and better efficiency over the years).

Another use case for Tesla turbines are to work with fluids that may be contaminated with particulates that would destroy normal turbine blades, since those are typically of flimsier construction than the Tesla turbine's robust disks.

If we e grave small size sawtooth on the side of the disc may work less slip underload and liquid is way better because incompressible while air may slow down tremendously under load

Will it work in reverse? Turn the shaft and have a efficient compressor or blower or vacuum pump?

A really good explanation of how these work, very easy to understand.

Can this be turned into a pump? Spin the discs to pump air or water out?

Thankyou for your recognition of Nikola Tesla. Truly we would be without the electronic prosperity we have today without him

Have you tried to make a room with full of retroreflector? like the bigger onces.

I've always thought it would be easy to take excess solar power, use thst to compress air and release thst air later to generate electricity. This seems like a very easy way to DIY that into reality. Now I just need a massive compressed air tank and a compressor, thankyou action lab for putting the last piece of the puzzle together for me!!

From experience I can tell the Tesla turbine can work just fine on Low rpm , I've replicated it from the ideas of (Charlie Solis) he can get from his 10inch turbine a about 5 horse power ! YES HP ! For my 7.5 inch 12 disc turbine whit a spacing of 0,5 mm it delivered 0,5hp at 7000rpm at 1,5 barr of steam pressure,. I really recommend checking Charlie's channel if you want to know how the Tesla turbine really works!

In my opinion, one of the most significant factors that makes the tesla turbine unattractive vs traditional designs would be the inability of the tesla turbine to digest system debris. No system is perfectly clean, no matter how much filtration is on installed. Turbines and pumps have to be able to pass a certain amount of debris(be it rust, silt, condensate, etc). If a turbine or pump is designed with such tight tolerances that it can't tolerate any debris, it becomes unrealistic use.

Consider the utilization of a portion of the generated electricity to power an electric motor, which would control the speed of the turbine and optimize it to achieve laminar flow, is a viable option to increase the efficiency of the system. There could be a gain in output with increased efficiency even with the use of electricity to control the speed of the rotor. By reducing turbulence and optimizing the flow through the turbine, the system's overall efficiency increases, leading to higher energy conversion and a corresponding increase in output. The energy used to control the speed of the rotor is small compared to the total output energy, so the net gain in output would still be significant. In an ideal setup the blades would be made of titanium or carbon fiber, although somewhat cost prohibitive, they solve the problem of distortion.

I wonder if this technology could be implemented on a micro-scale, benefiting from diamond-hard components with little weight

I think the general problem with TTs is controlling the operating regime, i.e. Laminar flow. For the TT this is when the disks are rotating at the same speed as the fluid. As soon as the fluid flow is changed or the load on the turbine is changed you break out of laminar flow regime. Maybe an RPM governor can help but I'm sure the engineers that work with TT in specific applications already know how to do this.

Q. How fast can a Tesla turbine spin A........ Very

The exhaust should be released through holes fitted at the center of the turbine. That will make it more efficient. And, I am always guessing if the pressurized gas can be released through a De Laval nozzle instead of a simple hose.

"hey everyone, today we are going to test a thing that works to see if it works"

I have always been curious about a long log shaped Tesla turbine built into a exhaust manifold driving another Tesla turbine as a turbo on a car. I wonder what it would sound like. I'm sure boost wouldn't be incredibly high but it should be near silent compared to a traditional turbo.

I'm not sure if I'm remembering it wrong, but I think Tesla turbines are used for some things in dams when producing electricity. It might also be the Tesla valve.. but there's something ringing a bell.

Tesla's turbine is based on Conda effect - attaching at the wall of a mooving fluid

Would be cool to see a regular turbine with VARIABLE fins so you can optimize the angle and approach a Tesla turbine approach when the load allows. Would love to see that!

Would it cause less turbulence if the shaft was hollow and that was used for the exhaust rather than ports on the sides?

Combine that with the Venturi effect 😮

thank you actor James :)

For what I know common turbines have an efficiency which is usually higher than 85%, usually also over 90%, so there is really no point in tesla turbines which in real esperiments with load show much worse performance in general.

Normal water turbines averages 90% efficiency , some reaches more than 95%. Even pumped hydro ranges between 70-80% where energy is lost in both operations.

04:53 - *"There's too much risk and cost associated with replacing all of the turbines that are currently in place in our infrastructure"* But that doesn't explain why the Tesla turbine concept is never used in *_new_* turbines. There has to be more to it than just that.

I'm surprised Thomas Edison didn't claim this as his own invention as well.