21st Century Prime Mover:
the Gas Turbine Challenge
January 2007
This is January 2007 -- we are now going on our seventh year of
Turbine Builders Club activities, and even longer for our Global Motive
Power Revolution.
So far we've covered everything from the mechanical design and
construction of turbines to energy systems that power them. We have sold
disc sets, finished rotors and a handful of complete Experimenter's
Tesla Turbines as well as CD's of information to build your own.
Last August (2006) we held a month-long open house for our New Energy
Workshop. We had a number of very interesting groups visit and give us
their views on the future of energy and transportation. The highlight of
the show was our advanced jet design -- built and tested in X-Plane
(computer simulator). The feedback generated by our little trade show
told us a lot about the world's expectations for this new century. The
workshop, along with our Club members' data, gives us a good indication
of what our constituents are interested in, and what technological
directions we need to pursue next.
Turbine Face-off: Tesla, Whittle & OHain
During the past several years, we have built and thoroughly tested
disc turbines and the energetic gas systems that power them. It is our
conclusion that the Tesla type of disc turbine works very well on
pressurized, steady state fluids, but falls short on pulsed, direct
combustion gas models.
Tesla himself found this to be true when he built and tested his own
pulse detonation turbine with valvular conduits. About that time he
dropped all further development and testing of his turbines and instead
turned to patenting theoretical systems. -- That is the point where we
picked up from.
Since Tesla's turbine development days we have seen a number of very
successful gas turbine designs move from primitive drawings to the well
developed machines of today. The two main gas turbine types in prolific
use presently are centrifugal and axial turbines.
Whittle's first patent drawings look amazingly similar to Tesla's
original gas turbine designs -- odd, isn't it?
Both Whittle in England and OHain in Germany discovered that only
bladed turbines could be made light enough and efficient enough to
develop enough horsepower per pound of engine weight to power jet
aircraft. It was also soon discovered that these bladed designs were
both inefficient and tended to burn out quickly unless huge volumes of
cooling air were forced through the engine (more on this later).
So it remains that the ideal or perfect turbine is yet to be
invented, which will more than likely not evolve from either the Tesla
disc model, nor the bladed Whittle/OHain models -- but rather a mix of
both, with a measure of totally new combustion and geometry
directions.
Winner's Corner: the New Prime Mover
The elusive, lightweight, gas turbine is yet to be invented. That's
where we come in.
As I mentioned earlier, over the years we have experimented with the
characteristics of disc turbines, blade geometry, steady state fluids,
and combustion models. We have yet to put all of the pieces together
into an ideal gas turbine system. Nobody had ever put all of the pieces
of the puzzle together -- Tesla, the English, the Germans all failed to
build the ideal engine. So now is the time.
With the ever constant threat of global warming, diesel engine toxic
gas emissions and the steady decline in global fuel reserves, the world
needs a new prime mover for this century. We have already proven the
usefulness of the Tesla turbine for solar steam and biomass/waste
product steam applications, and we will continue to develop these
applications in our New Energy Workshop.
However, 2007 is the year we begin to solve the most elusive engine
problems of all -- the gas turbine as a replacement to the stone-age
piston engine. What we end up with will be unlike anything anybody has
ever seen, and yet have characteristics of everything they have already
seen.
So stay tuned, it's going to be an exciting year.
Ken Rieli
