Paul Lamar wrote:

I happen to mention the shorting wires on magnetos. If these two wires
break your air cooled aircraft engine will still run. If any one of half
a dozen wires break  in a rotary installation the engine will stop.

It has taken the aircraft industry 70 years to perfect the installation
of air cooled aircraft engines. Hopefully it will not take us that long to
perfect
the installation of rotary engines.

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Paul, I have often considered how we could build true redundancy into the
rotary aircraft engine. There are essentially 3 things that are needed:

1. Self-energizing, mechanical type ignition (aka. a magneto). Why can't we
adapt an aftermarket magneto (Mallory, Vertex, etc.) that would also have a
crank trigger for the electonic systems? Can we fire one set of the plugs
with the mag and the other with the EFI?

2. Backup fuel delivery system (i.e. carb or mech fuel inj). I'm wondering
if we can't put a a/c carb (just an air valve) onto the intake manifold to
be turned on (mixture valve opened) in an emergency? You could adapt a
throttle position sensor to the carb throttle control, if needed.

3. Mechanical fuel pump. Is there a way to mount a mechanical fuel pump to
the engine, even if it had to be run via a belt?

Since I'm now obligated to use a conventional aircraft engine, I'm already
working on an electonic fuel injection/ignition system (aka FADEC) to get
the  huge advantages of these systems.I think this discussion should be
taken up by the group to see if there's enough experience and knowledge out
there to give us an redundancy alternative. If you had these 3 items, it
could truly be equivalent to an a/c engine, and it just might increase the
safety/reliability of our engines.

Chuck Harbert

 
The AirCraft Rotary Engine NewsLetter.              Powered by Linux.

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