An Updated Design Procedure for Tesla Turbines

Abstract

Tesla turbine rotor, a special case of the flow between two corotating disks, has been studied in the past analytically and the performance is discussed both qualitatively and quantitatively. However, there is no systematic design criteria/process given to design the rotor of a Tesla expander in the peer-reviewed literature. Such design procedure, presented in this article, allows researchers and engineers to design and optimise the rotor for a given fluid and design condition (Power, flow and rotational speed). In this article, we present a 0-D design methodology to calculate rotor design parameters such as disk diameters, the gap between disks, the number of disks and the rotational speed of the expander, and efficiency and power estimation. This design procedure is based on the correlations and optimal ranges present in the literature. The 0-D model discussed in this article is a promising design approach to the preliminary design of the Tesla rotor and then further fine-tuning could be done based on the CFD simulations when coupled with the stator. A case study is presented with a 3-kW air bladeless expander prototype in which the rotor is designed using the 0-D model approach and compared with 2D Computational Fluid Dynamics results.