Old message. 12/10/2008

Paul and Dave,

as mentioned earlier I have been working as development engineer for
Wankel Supertec for two years. Target was the development of a spark
ignited Wankel rotary engine, running on Diesel or Kerosene. I have
actually built and re-built approx. 20 Singles and one Twin rotor engine
(see attachment) in those days. The actual compression ratio was in the
order of 14:1 including a cut-out in the rotor flanks. Without those
cut-outs the theoretical max. compression ratio would actually have been
16:1!

The engine ran on Diesel without the support of the spark plugs at
nearly all loads and speeds except tick-over! But admittedly it ran a
lot smoother with the ignition being switched on. We even managed to get
it firing up on diesel right from a cold start without the addition of
petrol as we used to do at MWE!

Wankel SuperTec relocated all of their development work to Cottbus
University last year - and to Korea, see: http://www.lmlkorea.com/

The prices of Diesel and unleaded petrol in Germany are very much the
same these days as the government has increased the tax on Diesel quite
considerably this year. So the major advantage of the Diesel Rotary will
be in areas where there won't be any more petrol available...

Regards

Martin

Paul,

Circum. cooling layout on this one too. Opinions?

Chris Wood

I always thought it was a better idea than axial or series cooling.
However the NSU one rotor Spider engine cracked right at the spark
plug hole :) Assuming they fix that it would be way better IMHO.
As it is now the second rotor in the 13B and RX8 engine have
cooling problems first.

I don't have enough info on the cooling failure modes of three rotors
to confirm this. Axial flow cooling AKA series flow is not the
way to cool a aircraft engine. Right from the early days engineers
understood this and the OX5 engine was parallel cooled. Orenda
spent big bucks redesigning the Chev big block to parallel cooling.

Paul Lamar