ESR4 Ravi Nath Tiwari at AUTH
Ravi Nath got a good experience during his LFMT lab visit, where he was familiarized with different types of turbines and compressors including the Tesla turbine. During his secondment period, he performed the numerical analysis on a 3 kW Tesla (bladeless) expander of TPG of the University of Genoa, in reversible (compressor) mode. His analysis was focused to improve the overall Tesla compressor performance. He implemented some techniques that improves the overall performance Tesla compressor performance:
- the disk gap has been optimized based on the Ekman and Reynolds number to improve the rotor efficiency.
- two types of diffuser configurations have been numerically tested increasing performance and efficiency.
- the new model with optimal rotor gap has been compared with the University of Genoa’s existing geometry model.
In the analysis of the numerical results, the rotor gap was finalized based on the Ekman number and the proposed diffuser was selected. The overall efficiency increased by 10-11% from the UNIGE model with a higher mass flow rate and reducing the number of disks.