I 3D Printed a TURBINE and Produce Electricity With It.
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- PCBWay Your 3D & CNC One-Stop Solution: www.pcbway.com/
I REVERSED THE DESIGN AND PRINTED AXIAL COMPRESSOR: • Is it Possible to 3D P...
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This type of turbine is typically used at electricity power stations, where they direct the high-pressure steam to the turbine that spins the generator. Of course, steam is hot, and 3D printed plastic can't handle the heat, so in this case I had to use compressed air to test my 3D printed turbine.
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You and Integza should build a jet engine together.
Not a bad idea XD
Yes please and throw it in a FPV rc jet THAT IS ALSO 3D PRINTED
@@LetsPrintYTBreaking Taps is working on building his own jet turbine as well
Yes
PCBway does print in metal... Doesn't them?
You need to integrate your air intake into your stages. Right now you're losing all the energy of the expanding air to the intake. Your inlet air should lead directly to a small fan with increasingly larger stages behind. That way you harness airflow AND air expansion. You're effectively building a de-compressor engine.
I've never been able to fully wrap my head around the exact physics of a stator, only a general understanding. Your explanation has arguably closed that gap for me. Thank you.
I think your Rotr blades were backwards. Usually, you would put the thick nose to the front.
Also, for turbines, the first row is usually a ststor or a nozzle section, not a rotor
Yeah, in every airfoil I've seen, the leading edge is rounded and the trailing edge is really sharp
For the order: it depends on what the incoming air is doing. Think of it this way: the rotors work best when the airflow is purely axial. If the incoming air is already purely axial, the stator will just decrease efficiency. In a jet engine, the first stage of the turbine is sometimes a stator because the air flow coming out of the combustion chamber might have a radial or rotating component.
@@RichardBetel That is not correct. You can get more power out of the turbine if the flow is preswirled. That is why there is usually a nozzle stage in front of the turbine rotors, that adds swirl to the axial flow from the combustor.
They are definitely back to front.
Absolutely correct, he made it backwards
Just a small tip, hydroelectric turbines on a small scale use gravity as an assist. When you had it connected to your garden hose if you had held it vertically it probably would have worked considerably better.
You should be able to boost the power quite a lot by preswirling your air in the intake manifold before it hits the first rotor, and by putting the air transfer nozzles way closer to the first rotor and not have a big gap in between them. kinda like having the intake holes gradually turn into a stator that nests up against the first rotor as close as the other stators do. Im not saying double the power, but quite some at least.
I'm no engineer, but I was a powerplant operator for a time, and I found this very impressive even if most of the comments are highlighting areas for improvement, you've got more knowledge of turbines than most. Super cool project
Why are you building low pressure turbine for high pressure air from compressor ? This turbine is most effective with high flow and low pressure. For high pressure and low flow rate you should build pelter or tesla turbine. If you are driving this turbine with high pressure like that, your first stage is converting almost all kinetic energy, and other stages are doing more harm than good, by creating parasitic drag.
Have in mind that all turbines are designed to be most efficient at certain RPM so a reduction gear for that stepper motor should be neccesary.
Thanks
Good video. I think due to the size of the turbine you need a bigger volume of air rather than pressure. Get a shop vacuum cleaner and hook hose to the exhaust. Blow that into all the inlets. Try draw a vacuum through it as well.
Or he could maybe make very small airtight exit holes that actually turns the pressure of the air into velocity. That would probably greatly increase performance. I believe that’s what axial steam turbines do aswell
love to see fellow estonian youtubers make it big on youtube
Best estonian channel so far 👏 👍
one of the best channels out there with high quality and perfect quantity
love your content brother keep going would love to see you in the millions
that's why I love 3d printing community they make anything literally anything.
I was a bit worried that we dont see anything leaking this time but at the end you gave us leaky turbine. Thank you :D
I'm waiting for metal 3D printing to become dirt cheap like 3D printers of today. Metals can be recycled indefinitely unlike paper and plastics, and opens up a whole new avenue of possibilities.
Give it another 5-10 years.
Im a noob and just got my first printer a P1S!
First I love your accent 😊 also Im so glad I found this video.
Im trying to diversity my disciplines so for my project I want to build a compressed air energy storage system.
So it would combine solar, to compress air during times of solar surplus.
Controller logic and electronics
Pneumatics, and design and cad with the 3d printed turbines.
Im hoping to prove that while wasteful, compressed air storage has potential , you can just scale up your storage capacity.
My rational is the main issue with solar is the cost of energy storage.
Compressed air is cheap , available, servicable.
Its thermally very inefficient but again, if you anticipate 50% losses, its so much cheaper to increase your air storage by 100% and totally bypass this problem.
“Waste” isnt technicaly “waste” when your energy is effectively free from the sun. Who cares if I lost half of it , if I can still store 10kWh of electricity for a bad storm.
air must flow over the rotor blades from the thick edge to the thin trailing edge, you appear to have it backwards. Your set up will work well as a compressor, with the intake on the right 1:25
I was wondering if someone else caught that. Looking at the cross section made my brain hurt until I realized how he'd managed to invert the geometry so weirdly!
no, they are correct. you are simply confusing one aspect, aircraft, with something entirely different...reaction turbines.
they have to converge to form nozzles to accelerate the fluid to create... a REACTION.
they are "backwards" as that is the only shape that is aerodynamic and also converges. think "heros turbine". it doesnt work as well if its nozzles diverge and expand. maybe you can design a shape that looks more aesthetically correct yet performs the same function, or better?
think water sprinkler with rotating arms. they wont spin if the arms dont narrow down, converge into nozzles.
contrary to popular belief, that is exactly how a REACTION turbine works.
not my fault the education system cant explain two machines that have been in use for over a century without getting their fundamental operation confused.
part of the problem may lie in the fact that there are barely any true reaction turbines, and most of them are a mixture of reaction and impulse, whilst there are several examples of true impulse only turbines.
@@paradiselost9946 Nope. The reaction turbine works because the blades cause the moving intake air to change direction and in doing so it exerts a reactive force on each blade , combining to produce torque . The curvature of each blade optimizes the direction change of the air to maximise efficiency. The airfoil shape is simply the most efficient shape to minimize drag losses, but it needs the thick side facing the incoming air. So , just flip the blade profile to accomplish this, keeping all other geometry as it is.
@@gregarmstrong4653 that my dear sir, is an IMPULSE turbine described perfectly.
Absolutely F'n incredible. Hollywood would do well to hire you for an enormous sum. Your stuff looks more real than reality. Much more.
Woah, didn't even realize the video was uploaded right now, good video. I just hope you make a part 3 of the pressure washer idea.
Amazing project mate 😊👍
Very cool, instead hammering the metal axis put it on the freezer before try to put in the holes
To get the turbine to work with water, you will have to get uniform pressure throughout the entire turbine or much higher flow. With a completely open exhaust end, pressure is not building up enough to overcome the waters weight.
amaissin so much skills and so little knowledge of fisics, great comment.
The stator blades look like the rotor blades of the first stages of a steam turbine :)
If you want to get really creative look into radial outflow turbines. Didnt go anywhere as the turbine wheel got too large for big installstions but small versions are great and easy to print. You also get a natural expansion in cross sectional area as you go outwards
A tip for inserting the shaft, I have seen it done with good results where you put the shaft in a drill and spin it whilst you insert it into the part.
Have you ever tried balancing your rotary devices? (Fans and turbines. I don’t think gears will get much from balancing)
It certainly won’t fix most of your problems, but I think you’ll get quieter faster machines which will probably last longer. Clough42 recently did some videos about tools to do static balancing.
Also, the edges at corners of your housing that you needed to sand: if you put a small chamfer it should print better. Also look into your pressure advance settings.
Think you would need to make an end with a small opening for your water version. It should help keep pressure on the blades then, or use a jet washer to assist :)
Great build .
I think your rotor blades are backwards. The nose of the airfoil should face the flow. You could make your manifold preswirl the air if you want to increase efficiency even more. Awesome work!
I already knew you know… so I subbed
Great Project ....and gets the community talking together to improve on the design and build...keep it going!!
your 3d printing vids are awesome im looking forward to seeing your newest vids
Very cool...in water you should point the turbine down at the ground and let gravity assist the flow on all blades. That's how the turbines are positioned in hydro electric dams. That said your turbine is not designed for water. You would want more of a side entry stream. Keep going and see if you can design a jet turbine engine and have PCBWay print all the parts in metal. Would be a great series of vids.
putting the turbine outlet facing down will increase the efficiency when running on water
For a turbine running on compressed air, really you want a tapered body so the air is gradually allowd to expand from one stage to the next.
If you use q support blocker in cura you can change the properties inside said support blocker while also having different model settings for your part. Also try flipping the turbine so that it’s standing up when you put water through it.
Like fg said the first row would be nozzles. Instead of blowing it from the front you should attach the nozzle on the outside of the housing directly into the first set of turbine blades. It will give you significantly more torque at low rpms. And you will want to seal you stator to prevent air passing by any cracks. This is how a hp steam turbine works. Amazing work btw would seriously be interested in making one too!!
Very inspiring and now I know what a stator is. Thank you so much for this video, good job.
It's in the word. It could also be called immovor or stillor, stator sounds more scientific.
You use sound to get RPM. Look at the frequency spectrum of the audio, look at the highest peaks. They are showing the RMP, or are multiples of the actual RPM. If you already know roughly what ballpark the RPMs should be, find the highest peak in that area and 1/X Hz to get RPS.
Very cool! Though as others have mentioned, the blades are backwards. Either way, good work!
So cool, can’t wait to make this.
Great job and great video!
You need a very small nozzle at all of those intakes because compressed air isnt very fast, if you pass it through nozzle the pressure will transfors to speed which your turbine needs, try this experiment with some pc fans and different nozzles like when you blow from lungs directlly to fan, nothing will happens at all, but when tou use straw in front of fan blades your lung pressure will turn air into speed and it will work so much better. Hope this will help you
Literally the type of vid to watch on 3:47 am ( i messed up my sleep schedule)
Don't want to spoil it for you, I worked at factory producing turbine blades just for ten years or so, but you have rotors backwards. Leading edge is thicker, then is thickiest part of the blade, at 1/4 to 1/3 of length of the profile and then it slowly vanishes into trailing edge, that is relatively sharp (compare to leading edge).
Also, profiles for gas or liquid look quite different, not like it can't work at all, but efficiency-wise you can't just switch between those two mediums. liquids (water) tend to be non-compressable after all...
I didn’t understand until you compared it to a big mac. Thx bro
your videos motivate me to get creative again, thank you very much!
It'd be interesting to see efficiency of it
Like how much energy does it output versus the amount of energy needed to compress that air
I'd love to see your take on a turbine that is designed for water like a peltier
The efficiently will inherently be less than 100% 😁
I really wanted to see him hook up a multimeter to the stepper motor to see how much electricity he was generating
I wonder if the turbine would have spun with water if you had held it up vertically so the water could flow more evenly instead of being collected to one side.
Great work!~ The quality of the design is nice. Can't wait for version 2!👍
Subscribed because of this video. Awesome content man
Great work and use of the 3D printer. It is expected to work only with gas flow, for a water stream you will need a pelton turbine. Great video, thanks.
You need to keep the pressure at the input level. To do this, reduce the area of the output section to the input value. And everything will work!
You should be able to get the water turbine to spin if you constrict the water outlet so that the fluid fills up the turbine's interior. That should create the needed friction from water to turbine blade.
Maybe the pressure of the water is able to be increased so you could use the turbine. Would be cool to see something like that.
most water turbines use gravity also. the turbine is found in a dropper tube. If he had of rotated it so the hose was at the top it would have spun just fine.
1:00 Looking at that image, is it possible that you have put the profiles backwards? What is the leading edge looks more like a trailing edge to me.
Лайк... ) Теперь надо придумать - где брать бесплатный сжатый воздух. )))
When you connected the air fitting directly to the yellow piece on the intake eliminated the Venturi effect giving you less air flow
Nice video but there is a few things wrong with your design. What you have made is a pressure compound turbine (rateau). Your stator should be convergent nozzles and the rotator are impulse blades. Aka opposite to what you have plus your nozzles (BLUE) are the wrong way around. If you compound the design into 3 stages you need to design the cross sectional area to increase to keep the velocity at mach 1 at each exit nozzle.
theres no heat available to keep velocity at mach1... remember? thats why plain air cant break supersonics in a diverging nozzle? whereas hot air and or steam or other energetic fluid _can_
I agree but I didn't say it would, convergent nozzles chokes flow up to mach 1. In reality unless this design can supply a fluid that chokes the flow across the entire cross section there's no point using stage turbine. You could probably get away with a Curtis turbine but in reality a single stage is more than enough
Finally someone used multiple stages of compression
Shoukd have tried the tirbine vertical with the water flow. Gravety is pulling the water to the bottom messing up the flow of water through the turbine, for it to be horizontal you would need far more flow to get it to spin.
New sub. This is really cool man
I am simple your design is a very good thing
I wonder if the water did not work because it's not getting equal pressure on all the blades. Its just hitting the bottom blades. Maybe if the turbine was set vertically, and you pour the water downward, it will push equal pressure on the blades, and then maybe you get a better result.
Very cool! The water test was a nice touch. Now...can you print it in ASA and run it on steam? That could make it a potentially practical device to charge a phone in a power outage.
I was very confused by the assmebly until the Big Mac comparison 😂
We need more plastics in the world
I really want a follow up. Maybe tell us the torque and efficiency, try to make an actually useful generator, super cool stuff
I love electircity 🥰
Your turbine doesn't have any expansion which is required to optimise the energy recovery of a compressible fluid. Also, the aerofoil sections are going the wrong direction in your diagrams. I'm not sure if you've carried this across to your design.
1:27 In this diagram the air should be flowing from right to left, and the rotors and stators are switched up as well, the triangular blades should be the rotor
Use a shop vacuum in a blower configuration or a leaf blower 😬👍
I highly recommend you not use ball bearings for this build if you plan on leaving this in water. You might want to check out lignum vitae bearings.
I need to cuddle this super fluffy Cat
The opening on the grey one is a lot larger allowing air to be sucked in due to the speed of the nozzle air so having the other one and saying it dosnt work as good well Yh it’s only running compressed air not the extra sucked in air which means less overall air particles and less driving force
You should use brushless dc motors
Fun project if you ignore the fact that air compressors are only 5% efficient and I doubt your even gonna get back even 10% of that 5% with this turbine. Meaning every kilowatt your compressor uses generates like 5w if your lucky 😂
Also point on the splitter is that it offers way to much expansion room. 6 small jets would be better.
Restrictions speed up flow drastically.
-A compressed air engineer.
That clear housing is very nice. What material did you use at PCBway to get it?
I was wondering the same thing
Look into linear advance and flow calibrating to remove that excess material
The next wheel has to have a larger diameter to be effcient in the slower flow that has like 55% kinetic energy extracted from it. Each succsessive wheels of same diameter has a much lower overall performance. On 3 wheels the last wheel would act as a brake. You need to adjust according to Betz law to keep the power coversion efficiency per wheel up. On the same diameter you could better do 2 wheels in opposite direction without a stator.
Hey, this is awesome, super well done!! But one question, isn't the airflow reversed? It seems like the air flow is going from trailing edge to leading edge on the blades instead of leading to trailing. Or is this intensional in these kinds of turbines?
one of the few fundamentals and highly misunderstood parts of a reaction type turbine.
the thickening section when you think about it creates a converging nozzle.
the air enters the blades as high pressure, low velocity, exiting at a lower pressure at a higher velocity, as per bernoulli.
picture it, if you will, as the basic "heros turbine". or, a hose going mad when you turn it on. the nozzle reacts as the fluid accelerates inside it.
it then expands, slows down, and increases in pressure before passing through the next stage.
still, virtually every turbine is a mixture of reaction and impulse, or pure impulse... the fluid hitting the blades and transferring momentum by slowing down. theres only one or two examples of pure reaction turbine... hence why virtually everyone gets them confused.
Man I love elect *ir* city
You needed a water flow output plate similar to the water intake plate to limit the total amount of water flowing out of the turbine all the water flow pressure is lost and the turbine can't spin due to it you can place the turbine vertically and let the water flow top to bottom or bottom to top for testing if you have a wood piece or waterproof cardboard piece(cardboard with a side covered in a plastic layer) place it in front of the turbine water flow output side of the turbine and minor cuts for water to flow out of and figure out the size of cuts required to get the maximum turbine rotation speed and water flow.
Your turbine rotor blades are back to front, which is one of the reasons why it won't work when forcing water through it. It creates flow vortices behind the rotor blades, loosing efficiency.
If you're going to make a 2nd version, I'd recommend you pay more attention to the volume changes through the stators. You have air entering at a reasonable volume, then it being constricted in the middle of the stator as it changes direction, then expanding out of it before it hits the next set of rotor blades. This is absolutely terrible for efficiency, which water then reveals.
Water does not like any sudden volume changes as it's 2000x denser than air, so it exaggerates any pressure buildup problems. Tune it to run on water flow, it'll be amazing on air.
Stator version 2 would ideally have the blade thickness changing from the centre towards the edge, to account for volume differences in this axis. They'd also need to be pitched to match the entry and exit angles of the rotor blades, so the flow doesn't suddenly twist when it hits/leaves them.
🔥🔧🛩 That would be an epic collaboration! Imagine the possibilities of combining your skills and expertise to build a jet engine. The innovation and engineering involved would be mind-blowing. I'm curious to see how you could harness the power of a 3D-printed turbine to produce electricity. Count me in as a fan eagerly awaiting your next project! 🤩⚡👏
Use Carbon Fiber/Composites and higher Air Compressed Air Pressure... and see how much power you can get... should be interesting..
" I belive it's cooler when the turbine actually spins "
well then, guess you'll need to build a water powered generator next.
Im wondering what would happen if you were to cinnect a hugh powered brushless motor and then stick it under water, would it pump the water through with some decent force?
Doesn't the turbine depend on the mass passing through the vanes? If so you were creating a venture effect with the air gain and drawing additional air mass through the inlet which would be the reason for the higher RPM. I not a physicist but just a thought.
Very nice 👌
I would love to see more tests with turbines😊
That's a cool video, I wanted ti see this concept for a while ! However I have a question, why are the foils backward on the rotor and the foils on the stator so thick ?
As the fluid passes through the fan, the flow path is too large and the flow velocity is greatly reduced.
When the flow velocity drops significantly, the fan speed also drops significantly.
If the inner cylinder that supports the fan is thickened to narrow the flow path, it is possible to prevent a decrease in flow velocity.
I'd be interested to see what the turbine immersed in water with a water flow would do. I have a feeling that if the turbine was full then the flow of water _would_ spin the blades, so if not submerged then perhaps add a constrictor on the output so the turbine fills up and allow pressure to build within the turbine so it'll spin.
I've always wondered what the efficiency of a small gas turbine generator would be. Electric cars carry a lot of extra weight 363 days a year just so people feel safe taking a road trip, but what if you could rent a generator & put it in your trunk for the weekend. It really only needs to add 2 or 3 hours of drive time
Free Energy Machine... like a Jet Engine to produce Electricity, if you close the loop for the Engine, it shell Spend... try it. Like a refrigerator producing cold stuff.
You need a better input ! I think it will perform much better with a lower pressure and higher volume....that compressor gun head is giving high pressure but greatly limits your VOLUME if you can multiply your volume by TEN and reduce the pressure the same ratio You can get a second data point - then double that and reduce pressure again and you will have three data points - from here you can map out the entire range of volume, pressure and RPM. showing where the best combo is.
Brilliant work, dude! Nicely done!!! 😃
I've seen a "bladeless wind generator"... It's basically a small turbine like that with an air intake. So, who knows... Perhaps you could build something like that!
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Well. Good content.
What about spacer adjustment between rotor and stator ? Is there no friction between them ?