Mazda or we could make the rotary much more tolerant to temporary
overheating with a simple addition of a special seal.

This seal consists of a small strip of stainless steel 1/4 inch high 
inserted into slots in the rotor housing and side housings. This 
would shield the Teflon Encapsulated Silicon O-rings from the 
hot combustion gases in the event the engine was overheated 
so bad the rotor housing shrank. 

This type of seal is called a labyrinth seal. It is not 
a true seal in the sense that gases cannot get by it. What it really
does is cool the gases by forcing them to take a longer convoluted  path
and lose heat to the surrounding metal before they can get 
to the TES O-ring. The 500 degree F TES O-ring will do the real sealing.
The TES O-rings are shown in black in this drawing. The special
seal is shown in red. If the housing shrinks several thousands of
an inch  no big deal. The seal will still work.  Normally the
housing is unusable when this happens. 

In fact reject housings can be salvaged by sticking them in a 
mill and cutting these slots. Of course the same thing must be 
done to the mating end housings. The seal does not have to go
all the way around the housing. Just along the hot section of
the engine where the rotor housing is likely to shrink when
severely overheated.

BTW This happens to be an old two piece end housing sketch I had
lying around so I modified it to save time.  

Paul Lamar
 
The AirCraft Rotary Engine NewsLetter.              Powered by Linux.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rotaryeng/            http://www.linux.org