Analysis of a Tesla fan

A fan (or ventilator), which is a hydraulic device that allows a fluid to flow through a piping system by generating a pressure difference across its inlet and outlet, constitutes the main component of an air-conditioning system. The moving component of the fan is called as the rotor and it does work on the air increasing the kinetic energy of the air.The fans with multiple disks date back to the beginning of the last century?Nikola Tesla (1913). Tesla type devices differ from the others with that they have a special kind of rotor consisting of parallel disks aligned coaxially with the shaft. A momentum transfer occurs from the disks to the air through the relative motion of the disks. Tesla designed, built, and tested such kind of devices; however, he could not find an application area for them.In the present study, the characteristic performance of a Tesla fan was obtained by using an analytical flow model. To validate the results, the performance data of a fan which was tested previously was used. Eventually, it has been observed that the numerical solutions well agreed with the experimental data.Key words: Fan, Fan with disks, Tesla Fan