John Robertson is in way over his head

June 8, 2011 Posted by +Sharpshooter+

Who is your nearest competitor and in what ways is your engine superior to theirs?

There is no competitor for our Rotapower engine. Should someone else may attempt to build, our advantages would be in three areas:

  1. Over $250 million has been expended on the charge cooled rotor design of the engines we acquired the rights to. We also expended $35 to $50 million. The catch-up cost of a competitor gives us an enormous advantage.
  2. Our parallel path rotor-cooling patent eliminates side loading on the rotor and distortion of the rotor bearing. These are the denominate areas of wear in prior charge cooled rotor engines.
  3. Our patent applied for on the compound engine.

 

This was taken from Dr Paul Moller who is developing the Skycar. http://www.rotapower.net

This is what John Robertson is up against.  I have been tracking Mollers progress with his version of the Wankel.  The compound engine is a big step in the right direction for any kind of engine.  The Engineers that John contracted went in the opposite direction from the “compounding”.

John should retire and let some top gun take over.  Thats RegTech’s only chance.

Thursday, 1 January 2009

I have a good feeling about this year
Mood: a-ok
Topic: Fuel Efficiency
MOLLER INTERNATIONAL ACHIEVES BREAKTHROUGH IN ROTARY ENGINE PERFORMANCE

 

These guys are on the right track.  This is a summary of the press release;

Davis, CA, May 14, 2008 – Moller International (OTC-BB: MLER) announced today that it has achieved a major breakthrough in rotary engine performance. A version of the Company’s Rotapower® engine is designed in such a way that the engine’s two rotors operate in series rather than parallel. This design allows the first compressor/expansion rotor to supercharge the second power rotor while the exhaust from the power rotor is further expanded in the compressor/expansion rotor, extracting additional power. In effect, the engine operates in what is termed a compound cycle. Because of the additional energy captured from the exhaust gases, engine noise is reduced by 93% and exhaust temperature is reduced by 47%. Moller International’s non-compounded Rotapower® rotary engine has already demonstrated a fuel consumption 12% below that of the new Mazda Renesis rotary engine. Compounding is expected reduce the Rotapower® engine’s fuel consumption by an additional 25%.

The Wankel still suffers from a geometry problem that is similar to the piston engine and it would be difficult to over come with super charging or turbo charging.  However the compounding effect is a step in the right direction.  My version has this effect but it does not need the exhaust recirculation.  This wasted exhaust is from the bad geometry and to get rid of the waste the geometry has to be changed.

===========================

After a bit of google digging I found this article by Paul Lamar

Short Article by Paul Lamar published on the News Letter March 4th 2006

This is from the 1954 SAE Transactions. Development of the R3350 Turbo
Compound Engine. The book in the Caltech library had a 1 mm coating of
dust.

See the chart illustrations on the web site.

The power recovery heat balance chart knocked me out of my chair.
I had NO IDEA.... NONE WHAT SO EVER, prior to now, so much energy
was wasted by the exhaust valves in a piston engine turbo compounds.
Need I mention yet again THE WANKEL ROTARY HAS NO BLEEDING
EXHAUST VALVES!!!. More evidence we will eventually get more than a 20%
efficiency improvement with a turbo compound rotary.

Lets look at the heat balance chart with out the exhaust valves.
Total heat available to the turbine now over doubles to
34.7% from 14.9%. The losses to gears and bearings also doubles
to say 3%. Windage and cooling loss goes to 3.2% from 1.6% and
aero and thermal losses got to 12% from 6%. Total loss percentage
is then 18.2%. 34.7% kinetic energy available for recovery
minus 18.2% losses is 16.5%! Up from only 6% with exhaust valves.

Total fuel energy burned in a 200 HP rotary is about 760 HP worth.
With exhaust valves you would have only about 6% or
45.6 HP available for the turbine.

Without exhaust valves you would have about 16.5% or 125 HP!!!!
Almost three times the HP available to drive the turbine!!! No wonder
you can boost a 13B rotary to 800 HP!! There is lots of kinetic HP to
be had in the rotary engine exhaust. Much, MUCH more than I had at
first thought. We always knew there was a lot of waste heat in
the rotary exhaust. Up to 50% of the total heat. What we did not
know up until now was what we could expect in terms of kinetic energy.

Chart "R3350TC-take-off-heat-balance". Out of a gross total of 3750 HP
the supercharger was consuming 385 HP. Subtracting 470 HP mechanical losses
from the gross total gave us 3630 net HP to the prop. Now look over on the lower
right side on the chart. The basic engine was 2750 HP sans turbines. Same as the
B29 engine.  All three turbines generated the takeoff HP increase or 880 HP. Divide
by three to get individual turbine HP's and you get 293 HP per turbine for this
R3350TC engine version.

Overall efficiency with a 10:1 air fuel ratio for take off was 17% without
turbo compounds and 22.3% with the turbines. Or an overall engine efficiency
gain of 5.3 percent at high power. Now the sensible power going to the turbines
is with the huge losses to the exhaust valves. About THREE TIMES AS MUCH will
be going to the turbines WITHOUT the exhaust valve losses. Chart three. "R3350TC Power
recovery heat balance." 

The power in the Mazda Wankel rotary engine exhaust has been talking to us for 30 years.
It has been saying. "Hook me to turbine, hook me to a turbine, hook  me to
a turbine." Anybody that has been around a Mazda rotary powered race car
without a muffler can understand the tremendous kinetic energy in the exhaust.
I have a race car driver friend by the name of John Morton who claims he
has permanent hearing damage from driving rotary powered race cars.

It was not until I read that SAE paper on the R3350 TC that I could put
a number on it. It then hit me like a supersonic shock wave. Yes of
course it has plenty of kinetic energy in the exhaust.

Now comes the time to harness all those super sonic horses.

Think of the Wankel rotary as an ideal gas generator for a turbine
engine.  A marriage made in heaven.

We are now building a traction drive device to extract the excess HP from
a stock turbo charger. Input speed RPM can be up to 120,000 RPM and output
RPM will be one tenth of that. The power from the traction drive output shaft
will be transfered to the e-shaft of the rotary by a multi v belt to absorb
the torsional vibrations from the rotary engine. We hope to recover at least
50 HP from the waste heat in the rotary exhaust improving the BSFC from
the current .47 to .376 at cruise altitude. The range of any airplane using
this engine will increase by 25%. We hope to test the engine soon on a dyno
and a SAE or AIAA technical paper will be published reporting the details
of the traction drive and the dyno test results.

Paul Lamar

============================

So Dr Moller is basically on the same track as Paul.

 

 

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