#AC DEFLECTOR HOW TO#

An alternative design is to use two discs, one either side of the hull, like traditional paddle steamers with side paddlewheels. Maybe the easiest configuration is to attach the motor and disc so that the disc rotates in a slot in the hull. With a straight motor, without a reduction gearbox, use lower than normal battery voltage: 1.5V instead of 3V, for example. Then a battery or two in a holder wired to the motor with a switch. You’ll then need to attach the disc to an electric motor. Find materials to make a boat hull about four times as long as the disc diameter: wood, balsa maybe, or expanded polystyrene.

#AC DEFLECTOR HOW TO#

Here’s how to make a smoothwheel ‘Tesla’ paddle steamer you can take down to a lake or pool to check out.įirstly, you need one or more thin smooth discs: something like a CD or a little smaller, maybe a plastic lid with the rim trimmed off. Too shallow, and there won’t be enough area in the water, while too deep and quite a bit of power will be wasted, carrying water upwards or forwards rather than backwards. The disc should probably sit with around 10-20 per cent of its diameter in the water. Roughly speaking, the propulsion force you get from a smoothwheel is proportional to viscosity, to the area of the wheel in the water and the speed of the wheel. The LIN boiled and steamed vigorously, the wheels casting droplets of steaming LIN into the air as they turned, and the little boat was jostled around. (LIN has an almost unbelievably low viscosity – 20 times less than water.

In fact, I’ve even tested a smoothwheel steamer on a shallow tank of liquid nitrogen. But not so low that a smoothwheel steamer won’t work. Treacle and syrup have high viscosity, while water has low viscosity. The forces which pull those layers is governed by a characteristic of a liquid called viscosity. You can use a plain smooth disc and rely on the ‘grip’ of viscosity.Īs a wheel spins in water, it will pull along a thin layer of water next to the wheel, and that layer will pull along the next further out layer of water, and that layer pulls the next one, and so on. But amazingly, you don’t have to put blades on the wheels to make them ‘grip’ the water. The wheels have blades on them which push the water backwards. Normally a paddle steamer is propelled by one or two huge wheels with their lower rim in the water. Beginning in Victorian times, Tesla discovered and invented a tonne of stuff like the AC electricity system we use today, radio, radio control and – what we are interested in here – the ability of rotating smooth discs to produce a jet of liquid.

The famous Tesla electric car company takes its brand name from the wacky but hugely inventive Nikola Tesla.

Ac deflector