Inside Out

Inside Out

And round and round...

Diana Ross-Upside Down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GtyMeEcPPE

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

This is fascinating. A rotary engine that inverts the Wankel design. Video in the article shows how it works. "The engine is a rotary design, a pistonless setup that maximizes the power-to-weight ratio. It’s the fruit of a dozen-odd years of work by LiquidPiston, a startup co-founded by Alec Shkolnik, who has a Ph.D. in computer science, with a specialization in AI and modeling. The engine itself is based on combustion technology developed by his father, Nikolay, a Soviet-trained mechanical engineer who retrained in the United States as a physicist.
[...]
“It’s kind of a Wankel flipped inside out, a design that solves the old problems with sealing and fuel consumption,” says company founder Alec Shkolnik. “The Wankel has a triangular rotor inside a peanut-shaped housing; we have a peanut-shaped rotor inside a triangular housing. Our seals go at the apexes of the triangle [...] and our seals are stationary because they’re in the housing.”
[...]
Radical new engine designs crop up all the time, but they rarely make the big time. Remember the gas turbines of the 1960s? The superhot, superefficient ceramic engine of the 1980s? The radically improved two-stroke engine whose exhaust was going to be cleaner than the ambient air? Even the Wankel repeatedly failed until Mazda’s engineers rolled up their sleeves and made its success a priority.

The saving grace of LiquidPiston, though, is the ever-expanding range of uses for engines of all kinds. Even if no car ever runs solely on one of its products, there are plenty of  market niches it could fill: hybrids, drones, maybe even chain saws."
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/advanced-cars/liquidpiston-unveils-tiny-but-powerful-engine

Comments

  1. John BumpJune 15, 2016 at 7:55 PM

    That's really cool. I am, however, dubious about their apex seal improvement claims. Spinning the seals made them work better because their weight helped them to seal. WIth that said, they were fantastic for power density and specific power, which is exactly what these designers are targeting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Drew McCarthyJune 16, 2016 at 10:06 AM

    And not much is being said about emissions, is there?
    Still, one can see many potential advantages, and it looks like they've built some working prototypes, and have reasonable expectations of how difficult manufacturing a new engine is.

    ReplyDelete

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