Moller Invents Supercharged Rotary Engine
 

This looks like a promising development for the rotary! The article mentions how this new design improvment obtains a better than 12% improvment in MPG over the Rennisis. With furthur development they expect anothe 25% fuel reduction :Eyecrazy:

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/...s5.16.08b.html

Flying rotary car anyone?

Nice find!

holy shit, that is freakin awsome news!!! Man thats exciting

I'd like to see a drawing of the compound set up. Or better yet maybe RG could stop by and let us know if this is something he had ever looked at :)

great news for the rotary

bad news for mazuda

look at it again.

"......12% below that of the new Mazda Renesis rotary engine."

the way i see the quote is "Moller International's non-compounded Rotapower rotary engine has already demonstrated a fuel consumption 12% below that of the new Mazda Renesis rotary engine." Meaning it already consumes 12% less fuel.

The compound design will imporve that by ANOTHER 25%!

it seems to be its probably 25% more fuel efficient because it makes 25+% less power...

they have a 530cc singe rotor and it makes 35-50hp. Make it a triple rotor and you have more siplacement then the Renesis and lots less power... http://www.freedom-motors.com/

fuel consumption 12% below those of renesis, tat is a good thing rasp =p

It looks like you are referencing an already established wankle based scaled down rotary engine. I didn't see anything about the compound-rotary design. That is the new twist i'd like to see more about.

I've thought about what they are doing and quite frankly the way they have gone about it is quite creative! What they are doing is called turbocompounding and it is something that has been used for a long time to increase efficiency going back to WWII fighters.

Study this website and the links on it. This is a page from an aircraft rotary engine website. Tracy Cook sees the future of rotary efficiency as being turbo compounding and he shares some of his (overly complex) ideas.

http://www.rotaryeng.net/turbo-compound.html

Now once you've gone over that and studied how it works, imagine instead of using a turbosupercharger as in those diagrams, you instead replaced it with a rotor. This rotor just happens to be the other one. You make it larger. It brings in air and compresses it but instead of getting ignited and sent further around, just imagine a port located where the trailing spark plug is. This sends the now compressed air out of this rotor after only having travelled half of the rotational distance of the rotor and moves this air to the inlet of the other smaller rotor. Now it's basically boosted air. It gets compressed in this rotor, ignited and sent back around just as all other rotaries do now. The difference being that when it gets to the exhaust ports, the exhaust now gets sent back to the other rotor and enters in somewhere around below where a leading spark plug would be. Now it goes through further expansion (since it has picked up heat energy), and recovers some of this energy by pushing on the rotor before getting sent out of the engine. Because some of this energy was recovered and returned to the crank, it is more efficient than if the energy had merely been sent out the tailpipe. The larger compressing rotor would not have dished rotor faces so compression could be taken up quite high as a result.

I like it! The key of course is not to think of the engine as a 2 rotor that makes 2/3 the power but rather a 1 rotor that makes 2/3 the horsepower of 2 with greater efficiency that is quieter and also has a large wankel supercharger attached to the front of it!

Thanks RG! That was a great explanation. I can picture it perfecly now :)

what about power output.
________
Washington Dispensaries

what a bout a 3 rotor design .. the 1st rotor compresses air for the other 2? is this possible?

wait...so then if you added a turbo...

youd give yourself an stroke trying to figure the math out...haa

if it's 96% quieter, I'm going to need a 35" ID catless midpipe to make up for it.

Thanks Fred!!

I've been searching for this snippet for a LONG TIME!!

"The power in the Mazda Wankel rotary engine exhaust has been talking to us for 30 years.
It has been saying. "Hook me to turbine, hook me to a turbine, hook me to
a turbine." Anybody that has been around a Mazda rotary powered race car
without a muffler can understand the tremendous kinetic energy in the exhaust.
I have a race car driver friend by the name of John Morton who claims he
has permanent hearing damage from driving rotary powered race cars.

It was not until I read that SAE paper on the R3350 TC that I could put
a number on it. It then hit me like a supersonic shock wave. Yes of
course it has plenty of kinetic energy in the exhaust.

Now comes the time to harness all those super sonic horses.

Think of the Wankel rotary as an ideal gas generator for a turbine
engine. A marriage made in heaven."

I had lost it a year ago...much like my mind...

Of course it's quieter. The compound turbocharger/rotor is absorbing lots of energy. Sound is a form of energy. A turbo quiets an engine down considerably and sound can actually pass straight through it quite easily. With this arrangement, the sound of the exhaust leaving the power rotor is never opened to the outside world. It is always hidden somehow behind the closed ports of another rotor's chamber. I'd be willing to be it would require very little muffling. However I'm also pretty sure that enough heat is lost in the process that cat lightoff would be pretty difficult to do.

If you reread the article you can see that Moller has already passed all of california's emmission standards with a completly catless unit. That is pretty cool shit!

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there is no way anyone is going to convince me that using exhaust gases and engine torque to spin a dead rotor (which has lots of rotational inertia, lots of friction, and a poor design for this job) and use it as a compressor is any more efficient then sending the exhaust gases to a dedicated turbo which is low on friction, low on rotational inertia, has blades designed to compress air efficiently, and is not run off the engine....

someone might as well ask moller how his "skycar" has all this engineering and after 10 years now hasn't done anything more then lift of the ground a few feet... its worse then John Delorean - at least he made a car that actually could drive

good point rotor , although the claims that emissions, noise and fuel consumption are reduced is enough to make it worth seeing how far this will go .

so basically its just like a turbocharged rotary engine, however, they use a rotor as a semi-turbo instead eh? cool ^^

you might want to look up what the rotary was originally used for..

thats pretty cool. id love to see new designs of the rotary in the near future