Tesla inspired pump and microfliudic gradient realized with lithography based additive manufacturing

The bladeless turbine was demonstrated by Nichola Tesla in 1913, though limited by its difficulty to maintain laminar flow between rotor disks and a lack of applications for the characteristically smooth flow outputs. These aforementioned limits are addressable by scaling to the microfluidic flow regime. Demonstrated here is a microscale Tesla pump designed and fabricated using a Digital Light Processing (DLP) based 3D printer. The miniaturized pump is characterized by low Reynolds number of 1000 and a flow rate of up to 12.6 mL/min at 1200 rpm, outputting 53 μW pump power. Coupling to a Tesla-valve based mixer network, the combination represents an all Tesla-inspired microfluidics system, Figure 1.