Word: wankel
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...seems a trifle small to qualify as a monopoly. Yet for nearly two more years, or until Detroit is ready with its own rotary engine, Mazda will be the only car sold in the U.S. with the rotary: a power system, first designed by West Germany's Felix Wankel, that is half the size of the conventional piston engine and has only three moving parts, v. 166 in a piston engine with comparable horsepower. In the best tradition of U.S. monopolists, the Japanese-owned car maker is making all the hay it can while the sun is shining. Last...
...inside a back room where admission was by invitation only. There, away from the car-hungry crowds, a young American automotive whiz and part-time motorcycle racer named Bob Karol displayed small models of a bold new engine design that may some day challenge the much-bally-hooed Wankel...
Karol's machine, like the Wankel, works on the rotary principle; that is, the energy from its burning fuel is converted directly into rotary motion.* Yet unlike other rotaries, it retains many of the acknowledged advantages of conventional internal-combustion engines. In standard auto engines, for example, the reciprocating actions of cylindrical pistons successively suck in a mixture of gasoline and air, compress it, turn a crankshaft after an electric spark touches off the explosive vapors, then expel the burned fuel residues. In rotary engines like the Wankel, the same effect is achieved not by reciprocating pistons...
Vibration-Free. Like the Wankel and other rotaries, the Karol-Ansdale design has fewer moving parts (no potentially troublesome valves, for example). It is almost vibration-free and weighs much less than conventional engines with equivalent horsepower. Ansdale figures that a 145-h.p. model would be only 27 in. long and 18 in. wide. Finally, the design has a distinction that the Wankel cannot claim: because of the uncomplicated shape of its pistons and rotor, it can be built with familiar piston-engine techniques. In contrast, the Wankel has introduced many new engineering problems...
...been completed or put into a car. But Pennsylvania's Anidyne Corp., which has bought the patent rights from Karol and is sponsoring the developmental work in Britain, is convinced that design can be turned into reality. "It can be hellishly complicated," admits Ansdale, who helped develop the Wankel, "but none of the problems are beyond the range of known technology...