The name is pretty misleading. There is yet another person trying to reinvent the wheel of internal combustion. This one is interesting though as it has aspects of the otto, diesel, atkinson, rankin cycles. The most intriquing part is the shape of the "pistons". Is this a familiar triangular shape I see there?

Basically they use 2 rotors. There is a small rotor that compresses the air as in an otto cycle engine. This air is then sent to a separate combustion chamber (rankin cycle) where fuel is injected and spontaneously ignited (think diesel). This is like a jet engine. Then the combusted air is sent into another rotor that is larger giving it a larger exhaust phase than intake phase which makes it similar to an atkinson cycle engine. Unlike a wankel rotary, it does this on each side of the engine. Basically picture our engines kicking air out of the engine near the trailing spark plug while on the bottom of the engine going on the other direction the same thing is occurring. Interesting.

As with most other engines he makes some wild claims about efficiency and emissions but until he actually builds one and proves it, these claims are worthless. I'm just happy there's a rotor shape in there. Even if it potentially never goes anywhere. Neat nevertheless.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006...t_a_rotar.html

 

Cool. Definitely some pretty unbelievable percentages for efficiency & whatnot. The only way those are true is if they "forgot" to mention the -100% HP.

 

Interesting. I wonder how far this engine design will go.

 

Cool concept. I'm all for thinking up new ways to do something. I'm not sure why they think they won't need any oil to lubricate the system or won't have sealing issues. Water is not really a good lubricator.

 

Pretty neat stuff. Wonder if it'll ever get done

 

http://www.liquidpiston.com/LPAnimation.asp

animation of the thing in motion. pretty cool.

 

The motion is very different than inside our engines. The chamber shape is totally different. After staring at it for a while I can see why there are no sealing issues.

 

I wonder about issues with the whole going off track and then waiting a while to get back on track every time a shaft reaches a corner of a rotor.

 

If you look at the teeth in the shaft spinning the close rotor, you'll notice that one is longer than the rest, so that's how the shaft can spin freely until that one cog hits the next row of teeth. At any one time, only one of the two shafts is actually turning the intake / compression rotor.

I want to watch how this one turns out... it looks really cool.

 

Looking at it again, air never travels around the engine like the wankel does. It's intake and compression are in the same spot. Ours aren't.

 

oh I see now. neat.

 

Don't Forget Australia's Orbital Engine...
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/aust...ticle_id=10041

Another that was going to "Revolutionize" the Auto Industry!