The Salton Sea in California contains enough geothermal energy locked in salt brine to meet the entire electrical needs of the United States 20 times over if it could be harnessed electrically. That requires spinning a turbine, and only the Tesla turbine is durable enough for it. Jeff Hayes discusses the engineering challenges involved with harnessing geothermal energy with a Tesla turbine system, as well as the unique characteristics of this the Tesla turbine that allow it to outperform conventional bladed turbines.

Hayes is a former Rockwell engineer and a member of the Tesla Turbine Builders Association, a small but dedicated group of engineers who design and build replications of Nikola Tesla’s famous bladeless turbine design. We caught up with Hayes at TeslaTech 2006 for this interview, where he delivered an overview of Tesla turbine history as well as outlining many of the remarkable qualities of of the tesla turbine that make it perfect for a wide variety of applications.

So what makes the Tesla Turbine special? Unlike a conventional turbine blade, which spins when water impinges on its blades, the Tesla turbine is a bladeless design which is spun by fluid friction as a liquid passes between two smooth, circular disks mounted on a drive shaft. It’s a bit like pointing a garden-hose at a bicycle tire: as the water passes between the disks, boundary-layer friction makes them spin along with the drive shaft they’re mounted on.

How do you get the geothermal energy? It’s simple: run two pipes into the Salton Sea, prime the Tesla turbine, and then turn it on. The Tesla turbine brings the hot water out of the Salton sea, runs it through a heat-exchanger to extract the geothermal energy, and then the geothermal energy is converted to power the Tesla turbine. Meanwhile, the cool water is returned into the Salton sea in an environmentally friendly manner and electricity is produced in the process. The idea of extracting geothermal energy from the Salton Sea didn’t originate with Jeff Hayes, and surprisingly the idea of harnessing this energy with a Tesla Turbine isn’t new either. Hayes, however, is the first to propose the using two concepts together.

The idea of using a Tesla turbine to harness geothermal energy first originated with its legendary inventor, Nikola Tesla, who described geothermal energy generation with the Tesla turbine in “Our Future Motive Power”. However, geothermal energy isn’t the only application for this technology: the bladeless design of the Tesla turbine makes it very flexible, and it can be powered by anything from steam to thick liquid slurry, or any combination of liquid in between.

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