See Thru Liquid Piston Rotary Engine - In Slow Motion

everywhere i look there's all  sorts of stuff laying around welcome back to another  see-through rotary engine episode but this time i have something  very different for you we're putting together a see-through  liquid piston rotary engine it's beautiful this is an engine that was recently developed and i like to think of it as a more advanced improved version of the mazda rotary engine simply because apparently they fixed most of the issues that the mazda engine had if you've ever had a mazda and broken an apex seal they will destroy your life you'll see what I mean in a couple minutes but before anything I have to get to work and build the transparent front housing for the liquid piston rotary engine and then hit up the east coast oh yeah we finally arrived at liquid  piston here in connecticut this is going to be exciting first time i'm going to see this engine in person good morning what's up nick how are you nick you're ready to rock and roll? hopefully you can make this work those are the last two covers I have great i'll carefully get on with it and start the assembly so would you call this like a  version 2 of the mazda rotary engine? the major difference which  very few people think about is the cycle it operates on a different cycle we call it high efficiency hybrid cycle and the reason for this name  is that we cherry picked the best features from otto cycle  diesel cycle and atkinson cycle and we combine them into a single geometry which is depicted here so we bore of the compression stroke from diesel because we compress it to a  very high compression ratio then you add heat at the constant volume which is extremely important were expanding like all engines do but we over expand like atkinson cycle so we cherry picked the best  features from each cycle that's why we call it hybrid cycle one of the biggest advantages  of the liquid piston engine is its size and power to weight ratio this engine makes about 4 horsepower  and weighs a mere 4.5 pounds i can hold it in one hand so we've got these three working chambers and if we just look at one  of the chambers at a time what happens is we've got air and  fuel that come in through the shaft so that's actually our intake  comes in through the shaft see here that intake port so that's where the air and fuel mixture come into the engine as the rotor is spinning it's drawing in a vacuum you see how this this volume here is is growing and that's pulling in a vacuum so it's  pulling in the air and fuel mixture and eventually the intake port  moves over to the next chamber and now this is a trapped volume so  this volume undergoes compression this is where the gas is compressed all of the air and fuel end up  compressed into this combustion chamber on the spark ignited version of  the engine we spark it at this time on the diesel version of the  engine we can inject fuel right now and it'll burn as a diesel engine would and then as the fuel burns it pushes on the rotor and that's actually your power stroke that's where all the power comes from and eventually the exhaust port opens up so here you can see the the exhaust port it's just kind of the opposite  of the of the intake stroke and what it does is it it pushes  all the gas out of the chamber and all the exhaust ends up inside of the rotor so that's a whole cycle for every revolution of the rotor  we get three combustion events happening in each of these chambers simultaneously yup so the exhaust stroke basically  exhausts right through that little hole into the center section of the rotor and then it mixes with the cooling  air on its way out of the housing that's right and so what what comes out of the engine is actually like 10 parts cooling  air and one part exhaust this is the intake that comes in  through the center of the engine fuel gets injected out here and then this is the exhaust  that gets blown out the back the air actually travels through  the middle of the crankshaft through the rotor housing channel  into the combustion chamber and then the exhaust stroke travels right through that port in the  rotor into the rotor center section and out these exhaust ports that's correct now that we have a better idea for how the combustion  cycle works with this engine let's go back to the lab and see if the guys have the transparent  cover set up on the test engine get it mounted on the stand get the high-speed camera set up so we can see inside of the engine  while it's running in slow motion we're technically in the lab the guys put together most of the engine here and the transparent cover that I made is all set ready to go this looks amazing it is so hard to convey how  amazing this thing looks in person I just wanted to show you how beautiful that's beautiful smooth and it's not scratching you're absolutely right let's get this mounted to the test bench start it up see what this combustion  process looks like in slow motion all right dave has the  engine all set up ready to go the first thing that we're  gonna run is gonna be propane if that goes well i'm gonna propose a crazy idea that i'm not sure that they're gonna be okay with but we'll see i got the high-speed camera all set up let's get this thing started and see  something the world has never seen before inside of a liquid piston rotary engine while it's running in slow motion all right let's go just by seeing that rotor spin it is so smooth it's like magic so satisfying ready to rock and roll let's see what happens so that was the first run on propane but since the lights were on and  we really couldn't see anything for this next run i'm going to cut the lights and then do one more run on  propane with the lights off that run went pretty well but you really couldn't see  the combustion very well that's my same experience with  the single cylinder briggs when i ran the propane propane is lame unexpected and completely out of left field the guys approached me and said that they're interested in  running my crazy idea next we'll we can set up a way to meter in  a small precise amount of acetylene directly into the intake of the engine similar to what I did previously in my garage let's see how this comes out i  think it's gonna look awesome okay so that looked pretty awesome I could actually taste the acetylene in my mouth while watching that clip for some reason for this next run it's just  the sweet smell of gasoline we're gonna run it on gasoline and that's something that everybody can relate to we got the line hooked up right here going directly into the intake manifold the engines all set up on the dyno ready to go high-speed cameras rolling let's see what this engine  looks like running on gasoline in slow motion here we go okay so that was the run on gasoline that looked the most spectacular by a long shot i mean can't go wrong with good old gasoline and it's been a long couple days this day in particular has been extremely painful all of our batteries are dead we're all done everybody's exhausted it's like past midnight here and  we're just wrapping up this shoot but all these guys are a good sport  they're all right here in the test cell everybody's still working here working hard and all these engineers stood behind  with us to finish up this video and this was quite an experience  so hopefully you enjoyed it don't forget to check out the liquid piston engine i'm going to leave a link in the description below this is obviously not a sponsored  product or anything like that this is just technology that is pure genius we all knew that the rotary had a lot of potential but there was issues like  the seals and stuff like that and these guys seem to address all of those issues and this i think is the way  the rotary should have been definitely check that out tell me  what you think in the comments below again thanks for watching see in the next video i'm here in their lunchroom and  uh this episode's just about done but i want to make sure that  all the engineers get credit most of the projects that I film I build I engineer them design  them and put them together but this particular project  is all these guys right here these are all the engineers I think there's way too many projects and too many companies where the  engineers just don't get any credit and these are the guys here  that actually make stuff happen that's it so I want to make sure all these guys get credit so I want to thank everybody  for all their hard work and when you watch the  liquid piston engine running all of these brains here and all of these ideas are coming together into one  machine to make all that happen so I think it's really important and I just wanted to give everybody credit don't forget to subscribe everybody if you can't seal the engine then  you really don't have an engine

Channel: Warped Perception

Views: 1,493,748

Rating: 4.9300137 out of 5

Keywords: see thru engine, rotary engine, liquid piston engine, liquid piston engine running, see thru rotary engine

Id: jLtyNtf9_ew

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/4d3d3d3__Engaged]

Ah, the rotary engine. Shout out to my 2004 RX-8 that had two total engine replacements and was knocking on a third — and this was all before hitting 40,000 miles. What a fun car to drive but it spent more time in the shop than it was in my garage.

2/10 ... wouldn’t recommend.

[u/nfactor]

To me, it seems as though much of the energy in the combustion is applying straight into the piston and not contributing to rotational energy. I have yet to see any torque numbers for this thing.

[u/awellam]

Interesting to see how long that rotor stays the correct shape when one side gets super heated and the other side continually cooled. Also, it still has apex seals? they're just embedded in the rotor housing now.

[u/Ethong]

"It's not a Wankel" say makers of modified Wankel.