The History Channel is playing Modern Marvels: Engines tonight.

"Story of the development of engines and motors, with particular emphasis on the ones that have profoundly changed society."

I saw the previews and they show a rotary engine. Ya gotta check it out if ya can!

 

That's at 10:00 pm eastern time right? Also is it the regular history channel or history international?

 

thaks for the info!! will watch with interest...Hopefully we will see a "7" ....

 

Oh man....I've got basic cable

 

it was on sometime over the summer, i was upstairs and my dad yelled to me it was on, i basically fell down the stairs in a rush to watch it, and i JUST missed the thing on the rotaries and it went to blimps and ****.. definately watching it tonight.. thanks for the heads up

 

so is this the same episode as they always aired?

 

dammit I was flippin through the channels and they were talking about HONDA when I got to it!
Oh well I saw it before...that mazda guy they interview is a flamer.

 

I did not see it..
Anyone got it on tape??
Maybe convert it and out it on the web?

//Magnus

 

I'm watching it right now. I think I missed the part where they mention the rotary engine. I've already seen the 260MB avi though. It's currently during a comercial break just after the part about electric motors.

Magnus, maybe somebody will have the avi on an ftp site for you.

 

Whoa, I didn't miss the rotary part. It's on right now!

Ah, it just ended. I know what I'll be dreaming about tonight!

Sorry Magnus, no working VCR and my computer's TV tuner video card makes really large vid files (I probably could have set it up right, had I known I could've recorded just the rotary engine part). You also need the right codec installed to watch it. I bet somebody out there was able to record it though.

 

They replayed it at 1am.

The guy they interviewed said something that struck me as strange: that Mr. Wankel said he was proud of what Mazda did with the rotary engine.... I remember reading about how Felix didn't like that turned his race horse into a mule. The mule being the gear driven version of the rotary, and his original version that rotated around the rotor being the race horse.

The info on the micro engines was very interesting as well as the nano ones. Unfortunately, they never really explained if the nano-engines actually worked, and if they produced power or anything.

 

Does anyone have any info on Felix's original design?

 

Did anyone tape it? I've got a few grand worth of video editing & compression tools - I could make some mpegs and quicktime clips and post 'em on my site...

 

NimrodTT and Inittab,
Yes I have! But if you want that info you'll have to come to a holiday overhere... No joking, the best site about Wankel's idea's is: www.der-wankelmotor.de. It is however in German. But I think it has a translation option or something.
The thing about the race horse and the mule is not something Wankel said about Mazda. The original DKM wankel engine was different in such that it had rotating housings aswell as a rotating center-rotor. Such an engine is basicly the best design an engine could be, as all moving parts (only very few anyway) are in a circular motion. The drawback was that an engine of such a concept would have to be opened every time spark plugs have to be changed!!! So the assistant of Felix Wankel at NSU, came up with the idea of holding the housing, and have the rotor moving. This required an excentric shaft, and motion was no longer circular. So Felix Wankel was totally against this design option, as it would turn his "racehorse into a mule".
When Mazda developed the Renesis (for the RX-8) it was said by European Wankel-addicts that the mule finally became a racehorse...
I hope I helped a bit :-)

 

heres what I know about his original but I may be wrong.

his original design had 4 or 5 chambers. the rotor was stationary and a housing spun around it. (this whole assembly was in a larger case)

his best prototype of 1.9 liters made something like 400 hp at 25,000+ rpm.

hense the name racehorse.

it had major problems though.

for one you had to rebuild the whole engine just to change the sparking plugs.

 

The rotor wasn't stationary (or it wouldn't be a rotor, would it? ) but the housing did spin around it, creating the 2:3 turn ratio now performed by sun and ring gears.

 

Yep; that's what I mean! Don't you just love that design? Bit of a pain for spark plugs, but hey, you can't have all, can you...

 

In theory, it would make more torque... but the DKM would have had all the chatter and sealing problems of the KKM design AND the problem of supplying spark to moving plugs, supplying coolant to a rotating jacket, lubricating and spinning the housing without parasitic power loss, etc... not easily overcome engineering problems circa 1957

 

I think all of those problems could be overcome, except the sparkplug. And I guess that's a pretty serious problem... Nevertheless, in theory, it's the greates design I have ever seen. So maybe, it'll return someday...

 

I think all of those problems could be overcome, except the sparkplug. And I guess that's a pretty serious problem... Nevertheless, in theory, it's the greatest design I have ever seen. So maybe, it'll return someday...

 

I had an interesting idea not long ago. Using High power microwaves, supplied at one point on the housing, and using the rotation of the outer housing to control spark timing, you could get massive spark througout the entire combustion chamber(you've seen what metal does in a microwave right?), and not have to have spark 'plugs'.

Anyway, just an Idea...

 

Most likely, the re-air Modern Marvels episodes a bunch of times. I saw the one over the summer, they only have the rotary in it for a few minutes at most. They interview some japanese guy from Mazda, and he describes how it works, sitting next to a TII on a display stand.

 

Without plugs you couldn't control arcing as precisely. You might end up with the arc 180 degrees from the combustion chamber, with the tip of the rotor acting as an unintentional electrode and the apex seal being zapped to slag.

 

Solution: forget about sparks. If the compression can be made high enough, there can be self-detonation, like using diesel fuel. Can be timed perfect, as the injector could be inside the engine. Injectors have long life-expectations these days, so problem solved. Another arises right there. Compression is mainly controlled by the housingshape in conjunction to the excentricity of the E-shaft. But higher compression would mean flatter, longer combustion chambers. This would lead to cold areas, a lot like the problems experienced with the single-sparkplug engine's in the 50's. Still, here could lay the solution for a very promising concept. The Wankel engine is basicly extremely simple, making it suitable for nearly any fuel type, so maybe some gas or something could work. Or a laserbeam instead of the conventional plug? Sounds high-tech but seams possible.

 

There are already Diesel rotaries, so the high compression/cold spot problems have obviously been solved...