Tesla valve:print in one piece

Tesla valve is a one way valve with no moving parts that gives a preferential direction of air/liquid flow.  It’s exciting because most one way valves have a flap that closes are a ball that blocks flow in a particular direction.  But not the Tesla valve. It uses air itself to block air from passing.

Tesla_valve_cross-section

Today I decided that I wanted to print a Tesla valve but all the designs I’ve seen require you to print it in two parts and then use screws to hold it together. That seems like too much work so I decided to design a Tesla valve that prints all in one piece.  You can download it here. This is all part of a bigger project which I plan to unveil in the future 😉

My first design was  kind of wonky. Blowing in one direction you would get smooth air flow and in the other, turbulent air flow but still quite a bit of flow.  added the fins in as well but the airflow is still substantial. I guess I’ll have to get back to it some other time.

Here’s my printer printing this Tesla valve:

IMG_0741

IMG_0742

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s