The Curious Case of the TESLA TURBINE

this video is sponsored by the great courses plus hello everyone just a quick note before we start the video my channel got hit really hard the last few weeks in terms of views and as you know small channels like mine depend a lot on views currently I've been getting about 2500 views per day and unfortunately the dream of going full-time into this endeavor is being postponed indefinitely I was actually looking forward to celebrating 100,000 subscribers with you guys this month and my channel's second birthday April 1st but I guess I have to be a bit more patient thankfully sponsors like the great courses plus really helped me keep going and I can't thank them enough for helping out but most importantly this is a time when we are surrounded by bad news and it can really drive us crazy if you are tired of this cyclical news out there why not give it a try they have a free trial and you can enjoy lots of great courses for you to choose from the great courses plus is a subscription on-demand video learning service with top-notch lectures and courses from top professors from Ivy League's and other great universities globally they also have experts from places like National Geographic this muthoni n' and the Culinary Institute of America through your subscription you get access to a huge library of over 11,000 video lecturers about anything that interests you science math history literature and even how to cook play chess or become a better photographer to start your free trial just click on the link below or go to the address shown here remember it really helps the channel and it might help you get your mind away from what is happening in the world right now now to the video in the past decade you probably have come across a Tesla turbine video on YouTube at some point most of them focus on the mechanics behind it or how fast they can spin the little thing I know I enjoyed very much watching those videos back in the day where they take these homemade turbines to the limit reaching upwards of 70,000 rpm if not more but we know that pretty much all of Tesla's inventions are surrounded in MIT and his turbine is just another one in the realm of conspiracy theories but after watching so many of these videos I couldn't help but question how did he end up with this idea something that was completely different than what he had done before funny enough I came to find out that there was a very interesting story behind this turbine and it all starts with Tesla childhood dream the dream of being the first man to fly [Music] hello everyone subject 0 here and political said there helped me out on my patron Cheers not everyone knows this but Tesla had a lifelong dream of being the first man to fly of course with an electric airplane little did he know that it would take decades for electrically powered airplanes to come true and no he was not the first man to fly but the dream was there and he even patented schematics for an electrically powered aerial transportation system to which I did my best to make this 3d model so you my dear viewer can see it in detail now today we can spark many problems with his design but this was an idea that started taking shape back in 1886 which sort of justifies it nevertheless he got the patent in 1921 where he goes into detail describing this mode of transportation the cool thing about it is that his machine allowed for vertical and horizontal takeoff except that the vertical take-off would most likely not work but again helicopters would only become a thing in 1936 this is yet another proof that he was indeed way ahead of his time ok cool but what does this have anything to do with his turbine hold on to your lunch my dear viewer because things are about to get interesting if you ever researched anything about Tesla you probably came across his Tower this is the famous Tesla's tower also known as the Wardenclyffe tower funny enough I used to read it wonder cliff but then Google corrected me you know the Google way and that is when I realized I was reading it wrong for so many years toughy this ladies and gentlemen is the 1 Tesla invention that has been the target of the craziest conspiracy nut theories of all time not only about what people made it up for or embellished but because Tesla truly believed in his own weird theory what I'm talking about is how he was marketing this device in many of the letters he sent to JP Morgan he talks about how this machine would be able to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world and also transmit energy he truly believed that this machine was able to do that and in an old wizardry Tesla style he would try to convince anyone that he would actually accomplish that Wardenclyffe was built mainly for communication as a radio and to provide wireless energy as he was marketing as it was because of this that some people back in his time thought that he wanted to give away free energy but contrary to what some may believe today that was never the case after all he needed money to accomplish things and giving energy away for free was never an option you see starting around the mid 1890s Tesla was beginning to struggle financially as little by little he was losing support from JP Morgan and the scientific community when in 1904 contributed to his depression phase getting worse by fall 1905 when his business associate William birch Rankin died culminating in a major emotional breakdown by the end of 1905 he was emotionally exhausted financially broke in debt and with little credit left to his name nobody wanted to help or invest millions of dollars required for him to finish his project the wanderer cliff I mean Wardenclyffe for the most part of 1906 he was still suffering with depression and anxiety but towards the second half of the year he started to recover determined to find ways to finish his tower project Tesla came back in an unusual way after all he went from Electrical Engineering straight into mechanical but why is turbine and what does that have anything to do with the tower well his hope was to develop this technology and attract investments consequently generating enough money for him to go back to his tower project after all he needed a tower to give him the required energy for the airplane to work yes throughout his life imagined electric airplanes being powered by stations on earth so the tower existence was justified in his mind because he believed that that was the best way to provide energy to his electric airplane but we must understand although his idea sounds crazy today is that at the time the best engine would provide at most 50 horsepower like the v8 engine intone yet that weighted 86 kilograms its power-to-weight ratio would not be surpassed for 25 years so they say so it made sense for him to make really light airplanes and provide the energy from the ground this is one of those ideas that kind of makes sense for the time but it's just not physically possible at some point he realized that certain transportation vehicles would require small but powerful and reliable engines he visualized his turbine by making an analogy with his AC motor the same way that the rotating magnetic field dragged the rotor he envisioned fluids dragging a surface by stacking disks onto a shaft and passing some sort of fluid by it the system takes advantage of the viscosity of the fluid in order to spin the turbine hence the bladeless term basically what he envisioned was a turbine that would significantly diminish what material science calls creep also known as cold flow by this using a bladeless design he would not only get rid of that problem but his turbine would be much cheaper and easier to maintain just a quick analogy an internal combustion engine has many moving parts and a lot of energy is lost through heat and friction among other things the system is less efficient in terms of converting chemical energy of let's say gasoline into mechanical power Tesla's turbine was able to convert more than 90 percent of steam energy with some speculating as high as 95% efficiency now I know that efficiency depends on a number of factors so I won't dive into this discussion here at the end of 1906 he was able to come up with his first prototype a mini turbine with eight disks of 15 point 2 centimeters or 6 inches in diameter with a total weight of 4 point 5 kilograms or less than 10 pounds this little thing was able to provide 30 horsepower but not everything was perfect the turbine had one major problem it would spin way too fast reaching more than 35,000 rpm leading to a second problem of the disks being stretched out of shape the next four years Tesla research ways of solving this issue but unfortunately he could not find any metal alloy that could survive the high rpm so he limited his design to 10,000 rpm at first plus an increase of disk diameter from 15 point 2 centimeters to 30 point 4 which generated 100 horsepower later he managed to further increase the power output by further diminishing the diameter from thirty point four to twenty four point eight centimeters and lowering the RPM to 9,000 increasing the power output to 110 horsepower in his first attempt to demonstrate his new invention and how powerful it was he made a turbine 45 point seven centimeters in diameter with a limited rpm of 9000 providing 200 horsepower but his demonstration ultimately failed because engineers wanted to see the thing spinning but in his wizardry way he wanted to show how powerful the turbine was by creating some sort of tug-of-war illusion think of it like the Tesla cyber Trek demonstration but the cars are not moving or one of them is not being dragged as you might come to expect none of the engineers present understood what he was trying to achieve regardless of his failure he managed to attract investments getting back in track to accomplish his lifelong dream but then another problem appeared in 1914 the first world war broke out the thing is there were three main factors that contributed to the overall failure of the turbine as an alternative to internal combustion first was that his idea was to use the turbine with steam and as we all know steam engines were in decline for the most part of the early 1900s for vehicles it stopped being used by 1920 when the internal combustion engine just took over completely second we have the problem with the blades which limited the turbine to at most 10,000 rpm or the disks would stretch and break the turbine this was a big problem because the power of the turbine depends on rpm and by limiting it you would have to compensate with increased diameter for them ultimately making the turbine much bigger going against his vision of a powerhouse in the size of a head he spent the next 10 years with many engineers trying to solve this problem but concluded that it was just not possible at the time and the third big problem was the war yes the war brought significant advances for the internal combustion engine which gained more popularity during that time because many inventors at the time were already using this technology for cars in airplane it made sense to pursue this technology so in conclusion Tesla failed here mostly because of external factors but ming-lee because he wanted to sell the turbine and let others find use for it throughout of his life this was a common practice which inevitably led him to be forgotten by history since most of his inventions were not attached to a company his name like for instance Edison with GE and then to put the final nail in the coffin Tesla once again mid-1920s fell into more financial trouble to which he was unable to recover today we see a lot of enthusiasm towards his inventions but no practical application for his turbine I personally would love to see any practical use for his turbine right folks digit we're done here [Music]

Channel: Subject Zero Science

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Id: mg4I2WIYAAM

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020