My simple turbine is much easier to make than a steam engine. Based on my modest experience with building steam engines. Once assembled it will be trued to final dimensions on the lathe. The buckets will be individually formed, silver soldered into slots in the rotor, then the shroud soldered to the outside. The rotor body is a dish design, machined out of a single piece of metal. The screen capture below is of the wheel design using Alibre Atom3D. I am working on a design for a scale model Curtis type turbine - it will have a 3" diameter 2-row wheel with reversing sector. There was also a very similar one in 3/4" scale described in the American publication " The Miniature Locomotive" starting in the Feb 1952 issue.
1954 issue of ME and ran for a couple of installments. Rowbottom of South Africa and commenced in the 11 Nov.
Coppus turbine instruction manual generator#
The article on a turbo generator that Ian refers to was by a R.E. I don't know if he built his own turbine, or bought one, you can get quite cheap air powered drill/ die grinders. I also read in ME that someone had built a tool and cutter grinder using an air turbine to power the grinder.
There was a plan for a Turbo Generator in ME, it was back in the 1950s/60s somewhere (I think). One of those projects on the roundtuit list. My thought is to make a bigger one for powering a generator for my traction engine. I'm already pondering the possibilities of a very high speed milling/drilling spindle for the BCA. I'm sure that Turbines are under-used, at least by non-dentists. I hope this information can be useful to someone looking for a very easy turbine to build. The testing of this turbine is given in my thread for testing model engines. This is a very small turbine with a 7/8" rotor that has been run with a very small boiler and a small airbrush compressor. The more advanced design is for a Terry turbine rotor that can replace the tangential turbine rotor and use all the remaining parts. I call my existing turbine a tangential turbine since I have not found a common name given for the open pocket tangential flow turbines. The drawings for these turbines are also shown in the gallery. The photos of the turbine assembled and the major parts are in my album. To get the ball rolling, I'll share the information I have on my model steam turbine and a more advanced design I may build.
I started this thread to create a place where we could share information about model turbines.