Tesla turbine for energy conversion: An automotive application

This project is to design and fabricate the Tesla turbine with gas as working fluid and looking at the potential of installation a Tesla turbine onto the car in order to utilize those energy which originally generated from vehicle´s engine and loss to environment due to drag force, and convert partial back to electrical energy and store within battery which hopefully can be used in hybrid vehicles or electrical vehicles for small energy consumption applications. The optimum design is determined based on the study parameters such as distance between disks and total contact area between working fluid and disks. In addition, the Tesla turbine´s torque is analyzed using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Software and found that the best distance between disks is 0.001 m while the most suitable contact area between working fluid and disks is 0.099 m². At the end of the project, it can be observed that the torque has increased by 29.6 % while the head loss has a significant drop of 26.9 %.