In recent years, energy harvesting from natural sources and waste heat has been attracting more attention from researchers in response to ever-growing energy demands, high energy prices, and climate-change-mitigation purposes. It is also an important step towards future sustainable energy usages. In thermal dynamic cycles, expanders are playing as the most important equipment for waste heat recovery and energy harvesting as well. As a kind of expander, the bladeless turbine has a promising future and more widely using owning its advantages on relatively long life, good off-design performance, easy operation cleaning and maintenance, a simple structure, no blade corrosion, and low manufacturing costs. There are numerous studies about using the Tesla Turbine as a key technology for energy harvesting in a wide range of applications and conditions. They are presented to help identify technologies that have sufficient potential for applicating to our life and marine industrial engineering. This review paper, initially, presents an overview of current studies both theoretical and experimental of Tesla Turbine usage for waste heat recovery alongside its challenges and investigation on the effect of its configuration, working fluid selection as well. To conclude, future perspectives besides possible ways of transforming waste heat energy to electricity or work, which leads to circular energy, are discussed. The ambition of this paper is to act as a first-hand reference, through the well-defined possible directions, to the young researchers and senior scientists.
This research was supported by the project "Test evaluation for LNG bunkering equipment and development of test technology (Grant No. 20180048)" funded by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries. This research was supported by the BB21plus funded by Busan Metropolitan City and Busan Institute for Talent & Lifelong Education (BIT).