Wankel Rotery Automotive Engines seemed to be a good idea in practive turned out not to work out so well

[schlimm]

RME

 

 

schlimm

In the Fokker E-series "the Fokker scourge" planes, the E stands for Eindecker.

 

 

When I was young, I'd swear the spelling with two Ks was used, the reason being Tony Fokker was Dutch.  But now I go to check and there is nothing on the first pages of Google but schlimm's given German spelling of the thing.

 

Nevertheless, that is the correct spelling. And the Fokker factory was outside Schwerin, in Germany.  Some of its ruins were still there last I looked! 

[erikem]

RME

The Germans decided the nominal advantages of the rotary didn't outweigh the advantages of inline power, just as the French adopted the Hisso 90-degree V8 for the Spad 180s and 220s for the more advanced power in the late war years.  I remain surprised that no good American designs using the Liberty were done in time to go into wartime service, but had the war been protracted even a few months longer I'd expect the advantages of a good V12 or even something like the Bugatti 16 to have conclusively favored multithrow crankshaft engines over any rotary ... or any early practical radial built with that era's technology.

One -um- minor problem with the Liberty V-12 was that it was built with a 45 degree angle between cylinder banks as opposed to the normal 60 degrees. Thus the Liberty tunred to be the way that American aero angine designers learned about torsional vibration. This was also the era where USN submarines had to avoid certain engines speeds if crankshaft lifetime was important, probably one reason all of USN's WW2 era diesel boats had electric drive as the only option for the props.

There was a highly interesting aircraft developed in Germany in 1919, I believe by Junkers, which used monocoque duraluminum construction (not the corrugated stuff that came later, as in the "Ford" Trimotors) -- it looks very similar to a small DC3 aside from the engines, which are either rotaries or primitive radials and give a shock of cognitive dissonance to people familiar with the form and packaging of American radial engines only a decade and a half later.

Charles M Manly built a 52hp 5 cylinder radial in 1901, IIRC the power to weight ratio was exceeded until after the start of WW1. I'm not sure how effective the cooling was on that engine. A few years after the end of WW1, some obscure machine tool company had a moderate success at making radial engines, helped along by some guy named Rentschler who also had some later connection with diesel locomotives.

One problem with the rotary engines was the inability to throttle down the power. Usual trick for landing was cutting the ignition, hence the old movie cliche of the engine cutting in and out.

[RME]

erikem

some obscure machine tool company had a moderate success at making radial engines, helped along by some guy named Rentschler who also had some later connection with diesel locomotives.

I think you are mixing up your Rentschlers.  Fred (whose company would have much more connection with turbine trains than diesels) was the one with the radials; Henry was the one with Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton and then Baldwin-Hamilton.

[RME]

The Liberty balance problems stemming from the 45-degree bank angle are well covered in this PDF article by Robert J. Raymond.

If I remember correctly, the details of the early Manly radial are in the Langley Memoir on Mechanical Flight (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Volume 27 Number 3, Publication 1948, 1911) which can be read online here, or the PDF downloaded here.