On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:08:52 -0500, Jon Elson
wrote:

Ed Huntress wrote:


FWIW, it looks to me like this engine violates a basic point of IC
engine design for thermal efficiency. By using a separate combustion
chamber, it multiplies the surface area relative to the volume of
combusted gas. The result is a very high ratio of lost heat to useful
heat.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing as soon as somebody brought
up "how do you cool it?" So, is the combustion chamber in the
non-rotating center?

It appears to be.

it seems like it has an intake/compression
piston and a power/exhaust piston.

Yeah, it's a split-cycle engine. But it doesn't appear to transfer the
unburned mixture to the power-piston chambers. Apparently it burns the
mixture first, in a separate chamber, and then opens a port from there
to a power-piston cylinder.

It's like a turbine engine with pistons doing the compressing and
delivering the power, rather than turbines. Or so it appears.

If there's also a separate
combustion chamber, than that's THREE places for heat loss!

Jon

Yes, with the separate combustion chamber being by far the biggest
one, because it not only is losing compression heat; it's also losing
heat of combustion.

There have been numerous split-cycle engines, including a number of
two-cylinder split-cycle motorcycles, and some were very successful.
They can combine pre-compression with as much supercharging as you
want. But they compressed the mixture in one cylinder and transferred
it to the other, where it was burned. There must have been some
thermal loss inherent in the design but at least the *hot* gas was
confined to the power cylinder.

This one looks different. At first, when I read "split-cycle," I
thought is was really a conventional split-cycle with what amounts to
an external swash plate (there have been many swashplate and
wobble-plate engines, but they don't use an external cylinder to
handle the eccentric drive motion).

But the central combustion chamber make this one an entirely different
thing. I wonder why they do it that way? It may be necessary because
of the geometric relationships of the cylinders.

--
Ed Huntress