Near the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Nikola Tesla invented an amazingly simple vane less turbine engine which developed ten horsepower per pound of engine weight. By way of comparison, a modern factory high performance, piston engine makes less than one horsepower per pound of engine weight. Tesla achieved this remarkable power to weight ratio with cast iron. Using aluminum for much of the same device would jump the power to weight ratio to at least twenty horsepower per pound, which was Tesla's goal. More remarkable is the fact that Tesla achieved this power as a steam driven turbine and not as a combustion turbine. His dream of twenty horsepower per pound is easily in reach of a modern machine shop. Possibly as many as fifty horsepower per pound is also within reach of modern production capability. So who needs a half pound, twenty five horsepower engine? Motorcyclists, home electric generators. RV electric generators. Hybrid electric vehicles, compact trucks and mini vans, one for each wheel. And who needs a four pound two hundred horsepower engine? Every mechanic who ever changed a five hundred pound, two hundred horsepower engine. Small aircraft pilots, small boat enthusiasts, compact and mid size car and truck owners, neighborhood or village electric generators. On and on it goes. Double the power and weight and we find a host of replacement conditions and options. Go the other way. How about a five horsepower engine that weighs two ounces? The uses of Tesla combustion turbines are limited only by one's imagination. Brand new truck, aircraft, boat and auto companies would sprout like potatoes to build vehicles around such tiny power plants. Although Tesla designed a combustion turbine for liquid fuel and invented a super one way mixture supply valve to create a high speed pulse engine, applying fast burn combustion principles to the Tesla turbine will substantially increase power output and fuel economy with very low emissions. Here we have a Twenty First Century engine that has been around and ignored for ninety years or more. With either one or two moving parts, depending on whether we use a revolving combustion chamber to reverse engine rotation, we also have an engine that is cheap and easy to manufacture. Tesla's passion was divided between wireless electrical transmission and anti gravity air transport. He had such a wide range of personal interests, he seldom developed anything to optimal function. This remains for others to do, opening all kinds of patent and marketing opportunities. Tesla did the hard work. Who will finish it? The Tesla turbine has found applications as a pump to transfer fish in hatchery tanks, to pump concrete and to drive boats. For reasons unknown to me but suspected, there has been little work done to make combustion engines with the design. The great opportunity being missed here is the ease of producing a multi stage engine in a compact, lightweight design that would easily double the best fuel economy possible with a piston engine and more than double the best power possible. Those of us with little economic and political power can get very excited about the possibilities of great mechanical power, as Tesla himself did. Supercharging combustion engines has been a technique for substantially increasing the power output by half, double, triple and more, depending on the strength of engine parts which must bear the increased loads created by the boosted power levels. Since superchargers are essentially air pumps, as are combustion engines, the Tesla turbine is not only an ideal pump for supercharging engines, it can be built as a unit with a Tesla combustion turbine to boost power by a factor of five or more. This is what makes fifty horsepower per pound a distinct and perhaps conservative possibility. While superchargers have been used to boost power for more than sixty years, exhaust scavengers are practically unknown. The Tesla design presents an opportunity to add a third stage on the exhaust side of the combustion turbine that will draw the exhaust gases out of the combustion turbine, making the supercharger on the other side more efficient. As a supercharger on a piston engine, either belt or exhaust driven, the Tesla turbine offers far lower cost, greater efficiency, greater dependability and ease of maintenance. The truly revolutionary supercharger application would come from a self powered combustion turbine/ compressor. It does nothing until additional power is needed at any desired engine speed. It is then switched on with the push of a button and can be controlled to produce the same amount of boost at any engine speed, something no belt or exhaust driven supercharger can do. Combine the elegance, simplicity, low cost, power potential, dependability, ease of maintenance and fuel economy of the Tesla turbine with fast burn vapor fuel and/ or water fuel with modern computer controlled fuel induction and we would have the perfect replacement for every combustion application known to mankind. How much longer will the very idea of it sit on history's shelf? |
