tesla turbine questions

The only Tesla turbines I've seen ran on steam.

Look up Frank Germano. Looks like his site is gone though.

they've be around for a while.

Karl

Can't be done. Anyone selling you plans to do it, is just selling you false hope.

Why not, please?

--They're remarkably inefficient. Been there, done that, don't bother. The Tesla turbine's one saving grace is its lack of things to be bumped into, hence it's niche market is in the pumping of live fish. It's a much better drive-ee than drive-er, so to speak.

The laws of conservation of energy. "completely self sustaining" would require that there be no losses to heat, friction, or anything else. That doesn't even get into the problem of extracting energy from this mythical device, which would require it to produce more energy than it creates. Tesla had some great ideas, but he had some stinkers too. Greater-than-unity devices fall into the latter category, and for some reason, Tesla's name seems to attract people who ignore the laws of physics.

Well presumably, he actually means something which will keep spinning, like how you can make a jet engine out of an automotive turbo. It doesn't produce much if any thrust, but it does sustain itself (given fuel of course).

Tim

-- "California is the breakfast state: fruits, nuts and flakes." Website:

Many of the people hawking "tesla-like devices" pretend that the "given fuel, of course" clause doesn't apply. That's my point, is all.

Dave

Yeah. Real shame the guy was such a nut and attracted these people posthumously :(

Tim

-- "California is the breakfast state: fruits, nuts and flakes." Website:

Haaken's mention of "running on propane or diesel" indicates to me that he recognizes the need for a source of energy. I'll leave it to Haaken to clarify what he meant by 'self sustaining".

This man you refer to as a nut invented the AC induction motor, and the first practical system for generating and transmitting alternating current for electric power. The commonly-used SI unit of magnetic flux density is named after him.

Do you, 100 years later, understand how an induction motor works well enough to call its inventor a nut? Perhaps you do. Good! We need someone who has that level of expertise. I don't pretend to have that level of understanding and I'm pretty sure neither Jerry Martes nor Bob Swinney would either.

Tesla is misunderstood by the general public, those few who know who he was at all, for a variety of reasons, mostly because they don't see the connection between his brilliant and insightful discoveries and inventions of his early years, and his grandiose, war-related ideas of the years before his death. Like many geniuses he abandoned many of his ideas in mid-stream: not necessarily because they didn't work, but because his attention had moved on to something else.

One of the most interesting stories about his life and work was aired on PBS last year:

It may be a bit effusive and uncritical; it reads that way, but I can't judge where the right balance is.

In 1974 I researched and wrote a brief biography of Tesla for _Electrical World_ magazine's "Giants of the Electrical Century" promotion. I got all the books I could to do the research but I didn't have much time (I had to several biographies), and I didn't come across anything as easy to follow as the PBS documentary.

-- Ed Huntress

Well, I know a little about it, but let me say I don't have a hankerin' to make one. I know the guy was a nut though - the good kind, a smart, inventive nut. He wasn't much of a businessman though, hence why we all know who Edison was, even though he didn't even actually invent the lightbulb. And as mentioned, Tesla's later ideas where kinda cracky...

Tim

-- "California is the breakfast state: fruits, nuts and flakes." Website:

Well, a turbine has ( usually ) a compressor , a burner , and a turbine.

By the patents, it looks like tesla planned to use a pulsating burner to prowide enough flow of air to spin the turbine.

By self sustaining , i meant that the turbine delivers enough power to , well , power a blower. That is needed to induce enough air flow in the cumbustor....

"D>

Well, don't get me wrong, Tesla _was_ brilliant, for the most part. I went to the Tesla Foundation in Colorado Springs a decade or so ago, and the place is (was?) literally overrun by free-energy seeking, and free-energy selling, crackpots. Really sad considering that he's the guy that invented A/C electricity, and his legacy has been polluted to that level.

That seems feasible. You would just need to have enough temperature rise and expansion to drive a turbine enough larger than the compressor to overcome the various inefficiencies. It would probably produce far more heat than motion, but it might be an interesting project and demo!

Building one merely requires the ablity to copy. Genius is in being able to imagine something useful that has never been done before, and make it work. Labelling another's ideas that you don't understand as "crackpot" only requires conformity, just another form of copying.

Telsa also claimed to have invented a death ray and a whole bunch of similar stuff. Like Howard Hughes, by the end of his life the term 'nut' was warranted.

--RC

Have you ever read any of his papers? The guy was a freakin' genius. Even with 100 years of technology and theory I still find what he figured out amazing. There is a book that is a compilation of many of his research papers. It's a little dry, but very interesting. If you think you're a smart guy, read this. It will make you realize you are a "little" person as far as intellect and contribution to society are concerned.

As for his later inventions and "crackiness", most of that was driven by investors heavily over invested looking for more genius. The "death ray" was a result of someone's brilliant suggestion of "wireless electricity". The result was the infamous Tesla coil.