Hard Drive Platter Tesla Turbine

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If you have one more dead hard drive left after building the top five dead hard drive projects give the Hard Drive Platter Tesla Turbine a try. There is more information about the build at Instructables.

“In the Tesla Turbine, air, steam, oil, or any other fluid is injected at the edge of a series of smooth parallel disks. The fluid spirals inwards and is exhausted through ventilation ports near the center of the disks.

A regular blade turbine operates by transferring kinetic energy from the moving fluid to the turbine fan blades. In the Tesla Turbine, the kinetic energy transfer to the edges of the thin platters is very small. Instead, it uses the boundary layer effect, i.e. adhesion between the moving fluid and the rigid disk. This is the same effect that causes drag on airplanes.

To build a turbine like this, you need some dead hard drives, some stock material (aluminum, acrylic), a milling machine with a rotary table, and a lathe with a 4 jaw chuck.”


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12 Comments


  1. hi, how can i get the plans to build my own rotary engine?


  3. Regarding Bob B.’s “the inlet port is in the center”:
    1) With the inlet port in the center, apply rotary power to the shaft to use the device as a pump.
    2) With the inlet port at the edge and exhaust at center, apply pressurized fluid to use the device as an engine that turns the shaft.



  5. What Robbo said, that is correct. I don’t know about you others, but those polished disks look very much like disks taken from a used hard disk memory. Disassemble one and see what I mean.



  7. Two ideas,
    1-can you use a pulse jet motor to power the turbine
    and
    2-do the holes have to be circular or can you cut grooves thru the discs

    Plans to show exhaust holes and do you need a muffler or baffle?


  8. What is the thickness of the metal used in the blades.



  10. Beer bottle caps on a nail work good too. I think .022″ is the recommended spacing but I may be mistaken. Tesla’s patents are a good read. He has the whole system planned out. There are several versions of the turbine and some nozzle designs. One version adds dimples to the plates to maintain separation. This seems to be a response to inter plate vibrations possibly caused by variation in the input pressure. He also designed a pulse jet for providing a pressure source. This might be intended for mobile operation where steam was less practical. The Shaft diameter in the model is so large that you might get by with linear exhaust slots cut into the shaft. Then you can save time not having to modify the disks. The spacers could be keyed into the splines/slots to keep things from slipping. I am guessing that the exhaust area should be proportional to the inlet area and the pressure drop. 10 sq mm input x 30x expansion = 300 sq mm output area. Exhaust out both ends for double the area.

    I have never made the time to build one of these yet. I think the turbine would go well with a Faraday generator. The high RPMs would generate high voltage which is something Tesla would have been interested in. He had a patent for a Faraday mod with spiral current paths on the disk. This was probably a response to eddy currents caused by the difference in velocity from the inside to the outside of the disk. He would probably have been using a large solenoid magnet to put the entire disk in the field. The spiral mod would not be of much benefit if using permanent magnets only near the disk rim. So If you just want to try putting a couple of magnets across your disks out near the rim, if the disks are metal plated you are in the generator business. If the voltage is high enough the current will jump the gap between the edge of the disk and the housing so no brush is needed there. Then you can go and run some neon lights, eh or juice up your charge equalization cannon.


  11. I was wondering the same thing abut that exhaust. Thansk for the info.


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