Nikola Tesla. Who doesn’t know about him?
Tesla has become a household name among engineers. He is known for his inventions such as the three-phase system of electric power transmission, patented the rotating magnetic field, and – of course – the Tesla coil.
Those were just a few of his discoveries.
But did you know that there is a century-old Tesla patent that is so brilliant, you’ll wonder why it’s not widely used?
This is the Valvular Conduit – aka the Tesla Valve.
Tesla patented this discovery in 1920 but never gained popularity in the use of mechanics, fluidics, or engineering. The concept was and still is very promising. The video below will explain how it works.
The Tesla Valve is a pipe with an intricately designed pathway inside it that forces moving fluid in one direction. What makes it unique is that it’s made to be a one-way valve without the presence of a moving part to resist any counterflow.
Meaning the valve is designed to create resistance in itself.
As the video explains, its converging side flows in a strong current moving only in one direction.
While on its diverging side, any flow would bump and redirect to another direction, slowing it down and eventually create vortices that would turn the flow back to its normal (converging) direction.
Another video will give you a more visual (and actual) application of the Tesla Valve.
In this video, he uses a propane gun to demonstrate the flow of the gas particles passing through the valve. As you can see, there is much resistance on the side of diverging, and some of its tail gases even slightly flow on its converging side.
Leif Ristroph of New York University thinks the Tesla Valve may have untapped potential.
Ristroph is an experimental physicist and assistant professor of Mathematics at Courant Institute. He specializes in fluid dynamics and applied biological and geophysical flow. He and his researchers at New York University think that the Tesla Valve may be more valuable in today’s technology than when Tesla patented it.
They replicated Tesla’s Valve and subjected it to multiple tests of flow and resistance.
They found out that the Tesla Valve has a greater resistance for strong, abrupt flows. They also discovered that the resistance works best if the flow comes in pulses and not in one steady flow. This action is similar to Tesla’s AC-DC converters.
This makes us think that Tesla probably thought of using the valve for that use.
But why isn’t there a lot of buzz about Tesla’s brilliant idea?
There’s a sub-Reddit called Ask Engineers, and somebody asked this question.
Some Redditors shared their idea on where Tesla Valve could be used.
While others thought a check valve is still more effective and that the only edge the Tesla Valve has is, it has no moving parts to stop reverse flow.
This question is also asked in Quora, and this is the top answer.
While this user weighed in more on potential uses of the Tesla Valve.
Nonetheless, Tesla’s patent has some untapped potential.
We hope that our current society will be more open to inventions and scientific breakthroughs that can help in enriching our lives and creating solutions to our world’s problems.
What do you think of the Tesla Valve?
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