Adaptive Wells Turbine - air models
Channel: Flexible Blade
Date: 29/05/2012

The film shows some runs of a 113mm diameter air turbine model, I made to test the characteristics of several rotor designs equipped with passive blade control along our patent DE102010011708.

As expected, all our adaptive rotors showed a tremendous gain of torque compared to the stardard Wells turbine and also very short spin up times due to very high starting torques.

Since the air flow of ordinary vacuum cleaners (~40 l/sec) is rather poor I used a leave vac to be able to test the design with more realistic airflows up to 250 liters per sec. At high flow rates especially the stainless spring steel rotor developed torques that could't be slowed down any more using just unprotected hands.

All runs were filmed without load and at moderate airflows.