Wow, this is such a cool turbine. Its just so easy to build, and its so forgiving of design, it just works. If you want to build one and test it, I have found an easy way with what you already probably have at home right now. Check it out, it will take probably 30 minutes to build this unit and then you can see it for yourself!
Parts needed
- 3 to 4 CD's
- The CD holder, the 5 pack plastic round one is best
- washers, just large enough to fit on the plastic CD pack spindle, just a bit loose on spindle.
We wanted to prove the concept of the turbine, but without any complicated building just in case it does not work, but, WOW, we got 3500 rpm from a cheap plastic, crude, turbine. I can't believe it, now I want to build a real unit.
Below, my neighbor, building test unit
This is all it is, very simple !!!
Each disk is spaced apart with a cheap washer and crazy glued to keep the exhaust ports in line on each disk. then the disk assembly just is placed on the spindle, we put a little grease on it to help them a bit. You can see the exhaust ports on each disk.
It actually works! I will post some videos of this thing as soon as I can compress them to a reasonable size...
Play with where you inject the air, we found that when you put it close to the disks, they would spin the fastest, and also if you can direct it onto the top edge of the disks.
Imagine, if you actually built a real unit with proper bearings how fast it would get going. Now that it has proved to work I want to build a real unit and see how much better it can get. I have an old SCSI hard drive, it is massive in size, so now I am off to rip it apart and see what size the platters are. The older hard drives had actual metal for platters. They are made out of aluminum alloy so I will be able to work with the metals. The newer hard drives these days are made of glass with a coating, and you cannot use those.
Here is the disk platters I am talking about, they are about 6 inches in diameter.
Now I have to machine the exhaust ports into the platters.
More to come.....