Canadian Rotary

[WHY]

About a year ago I read a news release about a rotary engine that was going to come out of Canada.. Initially it was going to be imported from Germany, but a factory was supposed to be under way in Canada and in about a year they would be manufacturing in Canada.

do not remember whether it was going to be a single rotor or a twin rotor or both, does anyone have any up-date or news on the engine. After reading some comments about the single rotor unit having some serious torsional resonance (power reversal) , I took the pencil to the numbers and it lookis like it will have a power reversal every 120 degrees, if this is right then it sure will require a serious flywheel to smooth that out.

I also see that with a 2 rotor unit you will always have a power stroke and a compression stroke at the same time and this will greatly help the power reversal situation since the power stroke will be working on the compression at the same time and these will be 120 degrees giving some overlap, almost like a 6 cylinder engine ( of course I could be wrong-----------again).

Still interested in those rotaries, appreciate any information from any place.

Tony

[mceagle]

I am not aware of any power reversals in a rotary engine, in fact they are the smoothest running engines I've ever seen. The apparently large counter weights are no different to any other engine, its just that they do not fit inside the engine as is normal, and they look more obvious outside the engine. Twin rotors would balance each other out if they could operate in the same plane but they can only operate some distant apart, so they still need the same counterweights as a single rotor (except @ 180*) to stop the tendency of the engine to "rock".

[KenSandyEggo]

I think the Canadian government wouldn't let them sell the engines because they refused to put a horizontal stab on them.

[WHY]

Hi Tim

Thanks for the info and comment, what I am calling a power reversal is when energy from something like a flywheel is needed to produce the power to cause the compression stroke rather that it coming form a power stroke in the engien itself.

Tony

[quadrirotor]

Google: quasiturbine

http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/

[13brv3]

Hi Tony,

The company you're thinking of is:
http://www.rotaryengines.ca/index2.htm

They list single, two, and three rotor versions, but in looking at their site, I don't see that much has changed in the past year. When they first came online, I exchanged a number of messages with them, which is more than I can say for the German company that owned the engine previously. They never even returned my email.

The problem with companies selling new engines like this is that they have an expensive, but largely unproven engine. It's sort of a chicken and egg situation, where people won't pay the money without being sure the engine is worth it, but we'll never be sure it's worth it until some engines get out in the field for a while. I encouraged them to make an engine available for one of the magazines, or some other 3rd party like a kit manufacturer who could do a longterm public test of the engine. I know they were talking to some kit manufacturers, but that's the last I heard of it.

Also, I believe your torque reversal analysis is reasonably correct. I've never worked the numbers, but it sounds about right.

Tim,

The reason you've never heard of the torque reversal problem in rotary engines, is that there are virtually no single rotor engines made. I do think there were some in the distant past, but nothing I know of in the past 20 years. There are of course these companies that sell single rotors, but who ever gets a chance to see one in real life, let alone test it to find a problem like this.

A flywheel is the brute force method to fix the problem, and for a car, that would be a good solution. For an aircraft, it will be much better to use a good pulse dampener to absorb the reversals, and save the weight of the flywheel. I still like the looks of Neil's drive, and hope he gets the chance to test one with a single rotor.

Cheers,
Rusty (back to work on the single rotor project in a couple months)