Jerry LaBine
Jerry LaBine | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Practical Tesla disc turbine construction; Build Your Own Tesla Turbine (1996) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Tesla bladeless (boundary-layer) turbine research |
Jerry LaBine is an independent researcher and machinist known for his experimental work on the Tesla bladeless turbine, the boundary-layer disc engine patented by Nikola Tesla in 1913. Working outside institutional engineering, LaBine built a succession of running turbines through the 1990s, reported his measurements to the Tesla technology community, and wrote a construction guide intended to put a working turbine within reach of an amateur with ordinary tools.
Biography
Very little biographical detail about LaBine has been published. He emerged in the Tesla-engine community in the early 1990s: he exhibited his first turbine in 1993, at about the time the Tesla Engine Builders Association was founded, and by the middle of the decade had built a series of progressively refined machines. He self-published his construction guide in 1996.
Scientific contributions
The Tesla turbine
Tesla's turbine has no blades. In place of buckets or vanes it uses a stack of smooth, closely spaced parallel discs mounted on a shaft inside a housing. Fluid — steam, compressed air or a liquid — is admitted tangentially at the rim, and instead of striking a blade it adheres to the disc faces. Viscosity and the no-slip condition at the surface drag the fluid along with the discs while the fluid's own momentum drags the discs along with it; the working fluid spirals inward through the gaps and exhausts at ports near the hub. Momentum is therefore exchanged across the whole wetted area of every disc rather than at a few blade surfaces. Tesla regarded the arrangement as inherently more efficient than bladed machines, and claimed very high figures for it; the design also tolerates dirty or two-phase working fluids that would erode conventional blading, and it is mechanically simple, being little more than a stack of washers, spacers and a shaft.
The turbine has never entered general industrial use, and the efficiencies Tesla claimed have not been reproduced at large scale — a point of long-standing argument among independent researchers, who variously attribute the shortfall to disc spacing, to nozzle and exhaust design, to rotor material and surface finish, or to the fact that few serious replications were ever attempted with modern manufacturing tolerances.
LaBine's work
LaBine's contribution belongs to the replication side of that argument. Rather than theorising about why the turbine underperforms, he built machines and reported what they actually did. His 1994 International Tesla Symposium presentation, "Mythical Tesla Turbine... Current Research and Results", set out the state of his own experimental programme; the accompanying full-length workshop, "Tesla Turbines... The Reality", was a practical session on construction. The framing of both titles is characteristic: LaBine's position was that the Tesla turbine had acquired a mythical reputation in both directions — miraculous to its enthusiasts, impossible to its detractors — and that what the field needed was hardware on a bench and honest numbers from it.
His second contribution was to lower the barrier to entry. Build Your Own Tesla Turbine (1996) describes building a working turbine from readily available parts, deliberately avoiding operations that require a machine shop, and LaBine wrote that the first book in the series was pitched so that a twelve-year-old could follow it. J. W. McGinnis, then president of the International Tesla Society, contributed a foreword noting LaBine's use of off-the-shelf components and simple assembly methods. The intent was that a reader could confirm the boundary-layer principle for themselves rather than take either the claims or the dismissals on trust — a recurring theme in the independent Tesla-research tradition.
Conference appearances
LaBine presented at the International Tesla Society symposia in Colorado Springs, the annual gathering whose proceedings were edited by Steven R Elswick and whose successor event is the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference run by Tesla Tech:
- "Mythical Tesla Turbine... Current Research and Results" — 1994 International Tesla Symposium
- "Tesla Turbines... The Reality" (workshop) — 1994 International Tesla Symposium
Works
- Build Your Own Tesla Turbine, self-published, 1996, 56 pp., foreword by J. W. McGinnis
- "Mythical Tesla Turbine... Current Research and Results", 1994 International Tesla Symposium
- "Tesla Turbines... The Reality", workshop, 1994 International Tesla Symposium