Design, fabrication and characterization of an air-driven micro turbine device

Micro turbine is one of the important components in a micro gas turbine engine. This paper reports on the development and investigations of a micro turbine device driven by compressed air, which consists of three layers of silicon wafers and two layers of acrylic plates. The rotor has an outer diameter of 8.4 mm with a thickness of 0.76 mm. The key challenges to develop a successful high-speed turbine device are geometry design and fabrication of micro blade profiles as well as air-bearings. The micro air bearings have been designed, and a deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process has been used for fabricating micro journal bearings with high aspect ratio. The micro turbine has reached a rotating speed of 9,000 rpm during test.