Internal Combustion Engine Of The Future?

[Wildaugust]

I can remember when they were telling us the Wankel Rotary Engine would be the engine of the future. That never materialized. So, is this the engine of the future?

[video]https://www.facebook.com/streetfx/videos/10154960288155112/[/video]

Who knows??? :shruggy:

It's an interesting design anyway.

 

[330dTA]

I remember Automobile Quarterly Magazine in the '60's and '70's going nuts over first steam engines, then gas turbine, and then wankels. None of those ever came to much. For an obvious reason: the regular gasoline fuel combustion engine was simple, cheap to build, easy to maintain, and had a lot of development capacity. In the sixties it got 8 to 16 miles to a gallon, and nobody gave barely any notice. Nowadays it (a new Ford Focus, par example) easily goes 30 to 40 miles to a gallon. And it's been taken for granted. A modern diesel easily tops 40 miles to a gallon. - Combine either of those to a pair of electric motors, and you have a driveline of the future.

That rotating assembly in that FB video looks like a pain to maintain, and the centrifugal forces the whole thing creates must be tremendous. I wonder if they can ever make it work.

 

[ceebuddy]

A crank plus a connecting rod is a rather simple and effective way to turn an up-and-down-movement into a rotary movement. This wobbly mechanism portrayed here is also somewhat of a crank but it looks like a lot of friction and I do not believe it would ever be as efficient as modern-day conventional piston engines.

 

[thrashingcows]

I watched vids on this a year or two ago....neat idea, but practical in the real world?

 

[70bigblockdodge]

So they turned a a/c compressor into a engine.

 

[mr. fix it]

This reminds me of the K-Cycle engine back in the early 1980's that Canadian Hoken Kristiansen designed but it disappeared...

http://www.google.com/patents/US4517931



[url]http://www.mcaac.mb.ca/PDF-Sidemount/MCAAC0903.pdf
[/URL]
Scroll down a few pages to find out what led to the demise of this wonderful little engine...