Design, manufacturing and testing of a hybrid tesla turbine

Abstract

A Hybrid Tesla Turbine with boundary layers and blades was designed, built and tested in this study. To investigate the effect of disc material and air flow direction, three hybrid turbines were constructed. To experimentally determine the moment of inertia of each system, a brake mechanism was also designed and manufactured for deceleration tests of turbines. Three turbine models were tested to understand the effect of disc material and direction of air flow. Using aluminium discs instead of steel discs had a minor increase in predicted maximum power. The maximum power was achieved when using a tangential air outlet, instead of a central outlet design. However, the proposed hybrid turbine design created much less power than of the turbine designs in literature.