Rotary Internal Combustion Engine
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The Rotary Internal Combustion Engine
To most people, when the phrase "combustion engine" is uttered, one conjures up thoughts of pistons, connecting rods, camshafts, and crankshafts though, with a rotary engine, it uses none of the forty moving parts that a standard four piston engine is comprised of, rather, a single-rotor rotary engine has only two moving parts. Originally conceived and developed by Dr. Felix Wankel, the rotary engine is an internal combustion engine, like the ones used in all automobiles, but the method on which if functions is completely different than that of the standard piston engine. In piston engines, the same volume of space, the cylinder, alternately does four different strokes intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. A rotary engine does the same four jobs, but each one happens in its own part of the housing. Tremendously lightweight, compact, simple, reliable, and efficient in the production of horsepower/torque, the mechanics and output of the rotary engine are simply astonishing.
The basic unit of the rotary engine is a large combustion chamber in the form of a pill-shaped oval, called an epitrochoid (Fig. B). In a rotary engine, the pressure created from combustion is contained in a chamber formed by part of the main housing and sealed in by the seal created from the apex the triangular rotor (Fig. A)...