Abstract
Tesla turbine and its applications in power generation and fluid flow were demonstrated by Nicholas Tesla in 1913. However, its real-world implementations were limited by the difficulty to maintain laminar flow between rotor disks, transient efficiencies during rotor acceleration, and the lack of other applications that fully utilize the continuous flow outputs. All of the aforementioned limits of Tesla turbines can be addressed by scaling to the microfluidic flow regime. Demonstrated here is a microscale Tesla pump designed and fabricated using a Digital Light Processing (DLP) based 3D printer with 43 µm lateral and 30 µm thickness resolutions. The miniaturized pump is characterized by low Reynolds number of 1000 and a flow rate of up to 12.6 mL/min at 1200 rpm, unloaded. It is capable of driving a mixer network to generate microfluidic gradient. The continuous, laminar flow from Tesla turbines is well-suited to the needs of flow-sensitive microfluidics, where the integrated pump will enable numerous compact lab-on-a-chip applications.
Highlights
In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla, a Serbian inventor, introduced a new turbine design that replaced the conventional impeller blades with smooth disks [1,2]
Mixer flow in microfluidic mixer, a μm wide section of a microchannel was imaged with gold flow in the microfluidic mixer, a 500 μm wide section of a microchannel was imaged with gold nanoparticles in the flow stream
Parabolic flow profiles were observed at the three rotor speeds tested. mixer geometries inspired by mixer network insert)
Summary
In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla, a Serbian inventor, introduced a new turbine design that replaced the conventional impeller blades with smooth disks [1,2]. This design places multiple disks in parallel on a rotating shaft. As the discs begin to rotate, the path of the fluid begins to increase in length, which in turn increases the momentum transfer In his 1913 patent for the “Tesla turbine”, Tesla originally anticipated this design to be used for geothermal power generation with an efficiency over 80% [3,4,5].
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