About a New Conception of Internal Combustion Engine Construction: I—Rotary Engines

In the paper I present a new construction of positive displacement internal combustion engines (US patent application 12/218,959, PL patent application PL 385 728). The construction is based on some newly invented mechanisms, the most compact and robust ones in existence, and is particularly suitable for coping with high loads. The construction is intended for high power density Diesel engines (particularly special purpose, e.g. military ones), homogeneous charge compression ignition and detonation engines. The presented conception promises substantial improvement of such important engine parameters as swept volume/total volume, power/total volume and power/weight ratio, without increasing specific loads and thus without sacrificing engine’s strength and reliability. Moreover, there exists a large variety of engine’s configurations within the proposed conception, namely oscillating engines and rotary engines utilizing flat or spatial mechanisms that can be combined with considerable variety of scavenging systems, ignition systems etc. Engines of the proposed structure (including rotary ones) have sealing almost as simple, tight and reliable as conventional ones and much simpler, tighter and much more reliable than conventional (Wankel) rotary engines. Besides the exceptional strength and compactness, the most outstanding features of the engines according to the presented invention are their gas turbines-like qualities. For example, rotary engine of the presented invention can produce 6 power strokes per shaft revolution (thus displaying V12 engine smoothness) while having only 3 major moving parts of extraordinarily strong structure. Moreover, the engine scavenging system makes the gas flow almost as smooth as (and similar to) that to be found in gas turbines. The first part of the paper concerns exclusively rotary engines and discussion of oscillating ones is postponed to the second part. The paper also touches upon the method for balancing the proposed rotary engines as well as an analogous problem of balancing my oscillating engines presented in the second part of the paper.Copyright © 2008 by ASME