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helno posted:I honestly have never seen a Rotary powered plane. I remember reading articles about them but they seem to have fallen out of favour. My understanding of why rotary engines seemed to be a good idea in planes is that it came down to two things: (1) the inherent smoothness of the design, and (2) with iron rotors in an aluminum housing (vs. aluminum pistons in an aluminum or iron housing) they can't seize from overheating. You can also run a rotary engine with pre-mixed oil like a two-stroke, which saves you from having the oiling system as a point of failure. Not sure why they fell out of favor, though. Just too strange a design for people to get used to?
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Jul 22, 2013 22:47
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 05:34 |
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I actually was wondering that after I posted. I think what they take out is the oil metering pump, which continuously feeds a small amount of oil into the combustion chamber, and just premix the gas instead. I remember now that the 12As (at least) have oil coolers, though, so there must be a larger supply of it somewhere for maintaining the e-shaft and things. And oil cooling may be very important to the engine's running, since there's such a huge temperature differential. Well, scratch that as an advantage. They're still extremely smooth though and only have like three moving parts (that's definitely fewer points of failure) and the power-to-weight and power-to-volume ratio is quite high. Plus you can negate the low torque by running them at their optimum RPM all the time and just gearing down to the propeller.
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Jul 23, 2013 01:11
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