Estudo de aplicação da turbina de Tesla como microgerador

Abstract

The search for and use of renewable energy sources has shown a great growth in recent years, and the development of a distributed microgeneration and its challenges. On this bias, the present work brings a proposal of a renewable source to be used, with the use of a more unusual turbine in an electric power generation. Here will be presented the studies that addressed the project and evaluation of a Tesla turbine applied to the distributed microgeneration. It was first investigated the trend of growth in energy demand and the contribution of renewable sources, with microgeneration being the largest representative of these sources. The constructive aspects of established turbine models were addressed, to make a parallel with the Tesla Turbine and highlight their structural and dynamic differences. Different authors have been studying the Tesla Turbine for several relevant features such as ease of assembly, application versatility, and low turbine production and maintenance costs. These aspects are of great importance to meet the demands of microgeneration systems, as well as for the development of a product for this public. To design the turbine, an average flow value, expressed in liters per minute was used as an initial parameter. This information was obtained through the survey of water consumption of two residential condominiums. Based on the methodology used by different authors, a Tesla Turbine was designed and assembled for the execution of tests and empirical data collection. The experiments were carried out with the application of the mean values of flow, simulating the values from the research of consumption. To evaluate the performance of the Turbine, a permanent magnet generator was coupled to it. The innovation presented in this work consists of the exploration of sources of driving force available in the water supply system, and other water systems that provide sufficient flow for a small potential generation. The tests were carried out in the city of Curitiba, Paraná, in the year 2019.