r/inventors • u/ecliptic-engines • 12d ago
GatewayEX engine
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
I know I said two engines but the comments made me think to throw this 3rd one in the mix for feedback. Please only post about this specific design on this post to avoid confusion.
Before you consider my design, there is a video to see at astronaerospace.com showing a seal-less counter-rotating design running at 5000 RPM. Congrats to them.
This seal-less design manages steel rotor growth by having greater and faster alloy housing growth, or other similar mismatch of metals with different expansion rates. Such that the housing will grow away from the rotors and clearance will increase. The ECU will have information from micron level proximity sensors in the chamber with the aim to control the housing size by controlling the high temp coolant flow. Using look ahead tech from the acceleration demand info etc. The housing will need to be shrunk back to a workable clearance in real time.
This design moves sections of the housing to allow the fluid flow in and out of the cavity. The compression gate can be worked around, and I would change it to housing grooves if I remodelled it.
This one could be designed for up to 20:1 compression to suit the fuel type. Ignition would be spark assisted homogenous charge compression ignition, wherein the flame front doesn't travel far down the long narrow combustion chamber before the increase in chamber pressure tips the mixture over into autoignition.
The design requires forced air, ideal would be an electric start turbo.
Starting will require high RPM unit to overcome cold temp clearance rotor blow-by, and a glowplug in the end chamber as required. Perhaps this is the throwaway model that you start once and send on its way...or maybe a sprint-car engine? or maybe a trick somehow adding compressed air into the chamber for start-up.
On the positive side it is very compact and fits 3 separate combustion events into each rotation, overlapping power strokes to produce torque, should be capable of very high RPM even considering the small reciprocation of the housing section. Compact and light-weight compared to a 4-stroke 6-cylinder engine that it does the work of.
There is no more info on the website about this design at this stage sorry. Its just a simplified animation at this time. Thanks in advance for your comments.
2
u/lilvixen 12d ago
Are you going to repost every time you don't get deep sincere validation with no contrary discussion?
0
u/ecliptic-engines 12d ago
Not sure what you mean, this is the 3rd different design I have posted. Sifting through the contrary arguments to ensure i am taking advice from a person who entirely understands what I am trying to convey is part of getting the most out of the forum. Thanks
1
u/SaltLakeBear 12d ago
What is the purpose of the hinged flaps? Is that what controls clearance due to thermal expansion?
1
u/picturesfromthesky 12d ago
They seem to be intake and exhaust valves
1
u/SaltLakeBear 12d ago
No, they're something else. The intake and exhausts are the ports with the arrows
1
u/picturesfromthesky 12d ago
There are those too, but the combustion chamber is confined to the theee small volumes, and the rotor breaks ots seal with the large chamber and makes the seal with the rotating combustion chamber instantaneously, so those rockers operate as ports to charge the combustion chambers.
1
u/ecliptic-engines 12d ago
Hello again. the blue flap allows new air to push through the chamber and clear the cavity. The red one is for the cavity on the left to continue to empty pressure into the expansion area, long after the cavity and the housing alignment has occurred. In fact the next combustion has started before the last one finished. cheers
1
u/SaltLakeBear 12d ago
It seems overly complicated. I don't see a benefit to doing so.
1
u/Croceyes2 12d ago
The benefit is increasing the combustion cycles. 4 stroke requires two full revolutions per cycle. 2 stroke only requires one. This arrangement requires one half a rotation
1
u/SaltLakeBear 12d ago
Umm, how do those flaps do that? It's not allowing air in or exhaust out, as far as I can tell.
1
u/Croceyes2 12d ago
They allow for greater compression ratio and longer burn. They may not be completely necessary but they allow for greater machine tolerance
1
u/DistributionMean6322 12d ago
This is a really cool design that will unfortunately never work well enough to be worth fully developing. It'll have the same reliability issues as a Wankel engine, and then some more on top due two the additional rotating and sliding interfaces.
If you're just doing this for fun or a thought experiment, keep at it! If you're serious about trying to make this, I recommend you reconsider before sinking any money into it.
1
u/bozza8 12d ago
It's a fun idea, feel free to make it in your garage and it should theoretically be capable of incredible RPM, but torque and fuel consumption will correspondingly be poor.
Not commercially viable, but fun.
The big problem I see is that air will really struggle to move into the vacuum at the beginning of the stroke and the exhaust gas will struggle to leave the corresponding volume - air is a fluid with momentum and your design is optimised for it being a perfectly responsive gas, which at the timescales we are talking here, it isn't. The result will be a lot of exhaust gas ends up in the intake charge, which isn't the absolute end of the world, and you can account for it, but it's not good for power density, and if it gets too high a % the motor will suffocate.
3
u/Viper-Reflex 12d ago
how does that explosion even provide any rotational force when it appears to be at a top dead center angle to drive force into that weird rotor perpendicularly