Word: rotoring
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...engine, and in high-level conversations around them, knowing mentions are made of something called an epitrochoid. Visitors soon learn that the models are see-through likenesses of the Wankel rotary engine-and an epitrochoid, in case they did not know, is the bloated figure-eight shape that its rotor follows when moving. Both the baubles and the vocabulary are just two more signs that the long-discussed Wankel has finally shifted up from being Detroit's vague "engine of the future" to a much more imminent status. The auto industry's growing number of Wankel watchers, including...
Coattails. The Wankel revolution has been expected for years, chiefly because of the rotary engine's elegant simplicity. Instead of converting up-and-down piston motion into wheel-driving circular energy through a series of complex linkages-the way a standard engine works-the Wankel rotors spin continuously and thus provide the proper torque to move a car's wheels directly. Rotary engines are smaller, peppier and potentially cheaper to build than conventional reciprocating models, and have only six major points of wear, v. 100 in a conventional engine. The most persistent bug, ever since Inventor Felix Wankel...
...land in elephant grass in a clearing. The only thing to be heard besides the rotor blades is the feeble stutter of the door gunner's machine gun. The landing zone is "cold" -meaning that there are no enemy about-but the troops find fresh tracks almost immediately. We follow the trail until shortly after 5. when another night position is set up. The forward artillery observer calls in artillery strikes on an area that he thinks the enemy might have moved into. He orders the strikes for 10 p.m. -like booking a telephone call-and waits...
...that the six-year-old, $168 million generator keeps breaking down because she simply is too big and too complicated. After the 1970 trip-out, for example, engineers had to remove each of the 188,000 layers of sheet iron composing Allis' 325-ton stator, which surrounds the rotor, then rebuild the stator in an air-conditioned, dust-free enclosure, because of the sensitivity of the equipment...
...Wankel. Toyo Kogyo paid West Germany's Audi NSU $12 million in the early '60s for rights to the engine, spent seven years and $20 million improving its performance. The most crucial problem, devising a tight but long-lasting seal at the three apexes of the rotor, was solved by substituting a carbon alloy for the cast-iron tip used in German models. The original Wankel engines belched clouds of smoke, so Toyo Kogyo built a 40-lb. "thermal-reactor" afterburner to oxidize the exhaust and attached a dozen more antipollution devices to the engine. As a result...