I'm the one who made that 3D printed Tesla Valve shown in the pictures and video. I'm currently inventing a jet engine with no moving parts. If anyone wants to ask questions about the valve's workings or about Tesla, go right ahead.
Would be fascinating to see what rate of wave action you would need to keep the flow going up hill.
On a pure art level building a pool on the beach that was filled with wave action like this would be kind of fun.
I'm not sure that a Tesla Valve would be all that useful for tapping wave motion now that I think of it. It might not work. One way to think of it is to imagine using a one way ball valve. That has helped me in the past from ascribing too much magic or revolutionary nature to the Tesla Valve.
Imagine a square tube that at one end underwater is just an open pipe which connects with this square tube which goes up out of the water on the beach to a pool which is say 10' above the water line. The pool has a drain which feeds a square trough going back down into the water.
The trough has a micro-hydro wheel in it. Or just for fun a pelton water wheel type wheel which drives an animated sculpture.
The interesting question for me, is this; Can the Tesla valve reduce the back flow of sea water enough that the following wave arrives with the valve still holding water?
Intuitively you can see that if the valve is 'full' when the wave returns then the next wave will push its mass worth out the top of the valve. If the valve is say 'half' full then the next wave should fill it and every wave after that should dump a 'half' wave's worth of water into the pool. This would be a good problem to set up for students learning computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as they could vary things like the angle of the elements, their size, and their quantity and characterize the abilities of the valve for various fluids.
Anyway, its a really interesting gizmo.
A ramjet?
If anyone is interested, there are some very cool no-moving-parts jets that aren't as well known as ramjets: The lockwood hiller pulsejet is a pulsejet that doesn't need reed valves. http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/valveless.htm
The Gluhareff Pressure jet is also a neat example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluhareff_Pressure_Jet
So, like that prototype Bruce Simpson was talking about ten years ago?
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UX5eNg...
Could you make an array of them oriented perpendicular to the plane, like a sheet?
Could you make it light enough to float on sound?
What kinds of things might it be good for? Sound dampening?
Could a paddlewheel configuration extract energy from air or liquid flow in any direction?
You could make an array of them perpendicular to a plane. Perhaps, by etching them into silicon. On a macro scale, you could machine them with a CNC machine, or even with hand tools depending on your tolerances.
For sound, you energy density is rather low, so the material you wish to propel would have to be incredibly light. And you would probably have better luck trying to lift a plate of some super light material. The Tesla Valve is most useful as a device where you want to check the flow from moving one way.
Anywhere, where having a moving part is a pain in the butt, and you want a more robust system. When you're etching things into silicon, generally, you want to avoid have to make lots of tiny micromechanisms.
As a paddlewheel, it would probably not make sense to use the Tesla Valve. Turbines are well understood. If you want to make rotary motion, that's the way to go.
My current jet engine work does not include a Tesla Valve, though much of it is inspired by it. When I began, I imagined using a pulse jet, and attaching an axialy rotated tesla valve to the front of it, in order to replace the reed valves. I eventually moved away from pulsed combustion though. Too noisy and not the pressure levels I wanted.
And seems like routing one out of aluminum on a CNC would be good as well.