The rotery engine was to be used not just for cars but other industrial applications however the seals gave out prematurely. Any of the engineeers here can tell me more about this engine and could it have railroad applications? As far as i know only Mazda used the engine and AMC Pacer was to use it but changed at the last minute.
I don’t see any chance that there would have been RR applications of a gasoline burning Wankel engine other than MofW. Rolls-Royce was working on a diesel Wankel using a larger rotor for pre-compression, but I suspect that too much heat got lost during compression and expansion due to the much higher wall area to volume ratio in the Wankel design versus a piston engine.
The Wankel rotary [note sp.] worked out just fine; the Japanese did all the necessary work on the tip seals (and in the process greatly advanced our knowledge in several fields). The specific thing that killed development at GM was the emissions problem inherent in the large swept wall area, which (at least at that time) could not be kept from quenching some of the combustion, and I believe had additional issues of intrusion of engine lubricant into the combustion chamber.
Railroads do not value ‘smaller and lighter’ powerplants, in general, nor do they value the ability to make high horsepower through very high cyclic rpm. (One person racing Mazda rotaries said that if you let the little red ‘overspeed’ light that came on at 9000rpm go out, you weren’t being competitive enough…) On the other hand, railroads do value extreme fuel efficiency, which is never going to be something a trochoidal expander with inherent internal combustion is going to provide anywhere near as well as a diesel crosshead engine.
The Wankel engine involves complicated steps to manufacture some of its components effectively; some of this is abated by the ability to make greater hp just ber ‘stacking rotors’ but you still needed considerable tooling and perhaps process changes to make the engines ‘for production’ – this was much harder to do in the '70s, in the infancy of CNC, and is still probably expensive (relative to, say, using the Koenigsegg valvetrain on a dynamically-balanced piston engine).
There is also some question concerning the whole of the engine life cycle: when it gets higher hours, or isn’t maintained correctly, the things that can go wrong with it, the failure modes it can experience, etc. are often different from comparable conventional piston engines.
The way I look at this and similar concepts like the Quasiturbine (which is not a turbine) is that they fit into a particular niche, with performance and packagin
In Germany, the NSU company made cars with Wankel engines, the NSU Ro-80 was a mid-size car about the same as an Audi. NSU was a division of Auto-Union which also made the Audi, Horch, Wanderer and DKW. The Ro-80 had problems with the seals too but any ones left on the road have been upgraded. Mileage was never good in those but I’d still own one. The Ro-80 came out in the late 1960s and it’s looks haven’t dated.
I would expect the higher compression ratio needed for diesel operation would have played a number on Wankel seals. Sealing has been a problem on gas engines at a much lower compression ratio.
It would, but not lethally insurmountably, Much more of an issue is how you lubricate the seals in the chamber environment and how you arrange the ports (for IDI) or the injector nozzle (for pilot injection or DI) with the entire chamber being swept volume. There are also concerns with combustion chemistry absent exotic promoters in the very short burn times corresponding to high-rpm operation.
with heated intake air you might be able to achieve polynucleate ignition, as with some two-stroke motorcycle engines, without getting into the detonation region. But I wouldn’t be too sanguine doing that with a larger engine, except at steady speed and constant load (albeit those can be approximated with an electric transmission) with cost-effective 1970s technology.
Which is likely why the Wankel Diesel used the two rotor scheme, with the rotor co-planar. What would have been the combustion chamber on the larger rotor was mated to the intake/exhaust of the smaller rotor. Compression/expansion is done over both rotors.
I saw only one reference to this project, which suggests that it didn’t work very well. The Napier Deltic on the other hand…
Sometimes a picture is worth 1000 words … or contains them:
For some reason, the exhaust noise level was extremely high on the Mazda Wankel’s that I saw race. They even had to use a muffler to keep the noise down. They were not fun to the ears as they raced!
I test drove a Mazda Wankel when they first came out and I didn’t notice that I needed to shift. I was up to about 45 mph in second gear and the engine didn’t give me a clue that I needed to shift. It was so smooth and quiet that I didn’t realilize that the RPM’s were way above where I would have redlined a reciprocating engine. it appears that no new cars are being built today with Wankel type engines.
Hey, how’d you guys like a look at a REAL rotary engine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSOQAtkI-2k
I’ll say this much, in it’s own time the Le Rhone rotary was a helluva lot more successful than Herr Wankel’s ever was! Follow the right side links for a lot more fun.
“Alors mon amis, I love ze smell of castor oil in ze morning! Eet smells like victoire!”
Wankels were a different breed, often unreliable, but great when working. I once rode a friend’s Norton Commender P53. It was a water-cooled, twin rotor engine, just under 600 cc as I recall. Better recall for driving in an NSU Ro 80 (twin rotors, 1000 cc, 115 hp) in the summer on 1968. I was hitching from Stuttgart to Mainz. After an initial lift, I got stuck near Mannheim. Fortunately for me, along came a stylish red Ro 80 whose also stylish Fräulein offered me a lift. That car had a lot of pep, like most NSUs of the time. No comments needed about her!
I’ll challenge that comment by putting Mazda’s race record up for comparison.
As well as the thousands of Mazda RX-7’s and 8’s as well as RX-3’s and RX-4’s that were manufactured and prowled the highways and byways - with many still doing so today.
In eighth grade science we learned all about airplanes. The teacher told us about radial, opposed, in-line and so forth. I told the class about rotaries such as used on a Sopwith or Nieuport. The teacher said that I was wrong. I told him that my father, who knew more about early aircraft than anyone I knew told me about them. He still did not believe me. I let it go as he was a teacher, no matter how ignorant. Many years later, I was at The Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome and there was a Sopwith Camel. I reached over the rope and moved the prop and yep, the engine turned with it. I thought, “what a horses ass he was.”
Rotary Engines are smooth and compact, but expensive and often unreliable
Were Wankel engines ever used in locomotives?
Maybe so, but a helluva lot of World War One aces flew aircraft with Le Rhone engines or Le Rhone derivatives or copies. Different kind of competition, I know.
At least the second place trophy in a road race isn’t “The Wooden Cross.”
I’ll say one thing, that sure is a lot of rotating mass and amazing to watch spin!
When I went to A&P school, we learned how to start an aero engine like that.
Really! I am surprised, considering the aircraft rotary engine was an evolutionary dead-end and it’s era pretty much ended with the First World War.
You were pretty lucky, Big Jim!
By the way, the now-defunct Virginia Aviation Museum had a cutaway Le Rhone on display you could walk up to and turn. It was a real masterpiece of the machinist’s art, let me tell you, just a gorgeous piece of work.
Curtiss-Wright did some experimenting with the Wankel also.