bloodline wrote:
Karlos wrote:
It might sound a silly name, but I remember it was quite a revolutionary (no pun intended) design...
IIRC it has fewer moving parts overall, better power transmission efficiency etc. The only stumbling block as I remember was the seals on the 'cam' (not sure what the correct term for the rotating doobrey that replaces the piston is). The materials available at the time weren't up to prolonged use, gradually wearing away and causing the thing to break down. Presumably modern materials have solved this.
Doesn't one of the newer Mazda's use a Wankel engine? Except it is now called Rotary. Presumably the marketing people thought "Wankel" was not going to sell.
The big problem I have with them is thermal efficiency and incomplete combusion, due to the large surface area and weird shape of the combustion chamber. they will never be as efficient or clean as a standard IC engine... but the complexity of a Wankel is so much less that they are often less than half the weight of a normal engine, which balances out that :-)
Personally, I prefer the Quasiturbine :-)
@ Karlos... I think it's called a rotor :-D
@ Bloodline, the poorer efficiency of the rotary engine is to do with the compression ratio of the fuel/air mixture which can be achieved.
Also, what's a quasiturbine? some kind of hybrid gas turbine which is efficient at low revs?
