[akkartik]

It's a cool idea, but you might want to just build it with a traditional valve. I think the Tesla valve relies on moving fluid. If you just submerged it half way water would leak out in the wrong direction. So it won't work well for applications in the style of Maxwell's Demon.

[ChuckMcM]

So there is a place off of Monetery I believe where there are pipes that extend out into the ocean from the beach. Waves coming into the beach push water up the pipes, the other end of the pipe up on the shore has sort of a pipe organ type end with a flapper valve so it plays one note when the water rushes in and another when it rushes out.

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.

[imperator]

Well. Describing our ideas without a diagram breaks down rapidly. I imagined a valve bobbing in the water, slowly elevating the water in a reservoir with each wave undulation. Thinking about it more, the problem would be an eventual equalization in pressure. But of course, I read this paragraph again and there all ways of imagining what the words are saying. If we were to really understand each other, we'd need to whiteboard.

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.

[mikeknoop]

Not moving water, but the potential for moving water, a pressure gradient.

[seclorum]

The kind you get in ocean currents, where such things a self-constructing Tesla valves are probably out there, somewhere, already ..