TIL
Still can't get my head around how that would operate though, or why it would be considered better than an explosive in a piston.
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wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Mon 14 May 2018, 20:23,
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At a guess
It acts on the spool, therefore a Wankel is actually a great choice because you're getting rotational energy out, with presumably far more torque than a mini turbine.
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Mon 14 May 2018, 22:12,
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How they work is easy.
Instead of putting fuel+air in you just use compressed air. With Wankels you don't have any valves to worry about. It's the same basic principle as a steam engine, where all you're interested in is having a ready supply of a high-pressure working fluid and you're not especially bothered about how the energy gets put into it.
As to why, I imagine it's though the force is spread over a comparatively longer time rather than all at once, which might hurt the passenger more than the crash would, and they may be cheaper to recharge than the piston kind.
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jonbob loves you, Mon 14 May 2018, 22:34,
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So it’s an external gas generator, using the wankel rotor as a turbine?
I’m still puzzled by the whole concept as that means the suck and squeeze phases don’t happen, the bang phase becomes the power phase, and blow carries on as normal. You’d need to vent the first half of the chamber to prevent any compressive resistance.
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wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Tue 15 May 2018, 11:16,
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