Design, construction and testing of a Tesla Turbine

Abstract

This thesis presents the design, construction and testing of a boundary layer turbine, also known as a Tesla Turbine. A turbine, with discs of 92mm in diameter, central exhaust, plenum chamber, and swappable nozzles was constructed. The setup included instrumentation and a simple torque sensor with which to sense the relatively low torques given the low testing pressures. After construction, the setup was tested with various angles of nozzles ranging from 2.5° to 45° from tangential. The testing resulted in an estimated maximum efficiency of 8.5%, while running the rig at 3 bar, which is comparable to the literature. Unexpectedly, this maximum was achieved with a nozzle pointed at 45° from tangential, which may have been caused by the disc pack variant used in the tests.