This is a pretty cool development; a new take on the Wankel engine. Hope it works out.
5 thoughts on “The Return Of The Rotary”
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This is a pretty cool development; a new take on the Wankel engine. Hope it works out.
Comments are closed.
I’m not seeing how this deals with the seal wear problem.
Would there be an application for this in chain saws and string trimmers, where this engine could reduce the weight you need to lug around?
This new engine design looks to be an improvement on old school IC engines:
http://www.gizmag.com/duke-engines-axial/33631/
Interesting mechanism design.
There must be a feature that they are not showing in the video.
Treat the cylinder block as the reference frame as the crankshaft rotates, say, clockwise with respect to the cylinders. The swash plate (what they call the “reciprocator”) must turn somehow in the opposite or clockwise direction so as to keep the connecting rods more or less in line with their respective pistons-in-cylinders.
You could supply the constraint to rotate this swash plate by having the wrist pin in the piston allowing “up and down” by resisting “side to side” motion of the attached connecting rod. There is a known geometric theory to do this with three pistons acting on the swash plate through three connecting rods, but the mechanism would require a symmetry that their setup lacks.
The alternative is to contra-rotate the swash plate relative to the crankshaft using either gears or something akin to the CV joints in your front-drive car. In that case, the wrist pin would be made to articulate on both side-to-side as well as up-and-down, just like the connection you see from the connecting rod to the swash plate.
This gear train/CV joint arrangement has to fit within the hollow of the drive shaft where it attaches to the swash plate. Ouch. This engine is more complicated than they are letting on.
I’ll not hold my breath. A small turbine/electric hybrid would work better. Seals may be less of a problem, but still worse than rings.