Other Rotary Engines
Besides the configuration described in this article with cylinders moving around a fixed crankshaft, several other very different engine designs are also called "rotary engines". The most notable pistonless rotary engine, the Wankel rotary engine has also been used in cars (notably by NSU in the Ro80 and by Mazda in a variety of cars such as the RX-series which includes the popular RX-7 and RX-8), as well as in some experimental aviation applications.
In the late 1970s a concept engine called the Bricklin-Turner Rotary Vee was being tested. The Rotary Vee is similar in configuration to the elbow steam engine. The Rotary Vee uses piston pairs connected as solid V shaped members with each end floating in a pair of rotating cylinders clusters. The rotating cylinder cluster pair are set with their axes at a wide V angle. The pistons in each cylinder cluster move parallel to each other instead of a radial direction, This engine design has not yet gone into production. The Rotary Vee was intended to power the Bricklin SV-1.
Read more about this topic: Rotary Engine
Famous quotes containing the word engines:
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)