Word: rotors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Because of its basic simplicity, the Wankel engine has long been considered a strong contender to supplant piston engines in mass-produced autos. Invented in 1954 by a mechanical wizard named Felix Wankel, the engine replaces conventional cylinders and pistons with a triangular rotor that revolves in a combustion chamber shaped like a fat figure eight. The spinning rotor not only controls the intake of gasoline and exhaust of burned gases, but turns the shaft that drives the wheels of the car. Thus Wankel engines have far fewer moving parts than piston engines. Moreover, they lack valves, rods, lifters...
...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...
...Sanh, the distinctive pump and whir of hundreds of helicopter rotor blades began at 7 a.m., even before the morning fog started to lift. Drowsy pilots walked out to their UH-1 Hueys and malevolent-looking OH-6 Cobra gunships, checked out the oil levels, the instruments and the control linkages, and then strolled back to their tactical operations centers. The call to combat came as it has almost every day since the Laotian operation began, well before midmorning. At the heavily sandbagged T.O.C. of the 4th Battalion, 77th Field Artillery, 101st Airborne Division, blond, mustachioed Warrant Officer Fred Hayden...
...over Viet Nam was difficult enough in the days of the old H21 "Flying Bananas." Back then, in the early 1960s, one Viet Cong trick was to set up long spears and trip wires along the ground in such a way that they would be set off by the rotor wash of low-flying choppers. On occasion, startled pilots would find one of the V.C.'s wicked little missiles imbedded in the tail booms when they landed. Now as then, helicopters are extraordinarily vulnerable. Even a single rifle bullet in the huge disc-shaped target formed by the whirling...