Rotary engines (also known as Wankel engines and Wankel rotary engines) are quite different from piston or "reciprocating" engines. One of the distinguishing features is that they don't need valves to ...

In a conventional application, there are three rings per piston. The top ring is called the compression ring. Its purpose is to seal the combustion gas pressure, transfer heat from the piston to the ...

The rotary engine, with its egg-like block and triangular rotor, is an oddball even among all the other oddball engine designs—sorry, three-cylinder, twin-turbo, camless Koenigsegg, ya basic. That ...

In a world dominated by pistons, the rotary engine was something different for motorists. It was the vision of German engineer Felix Wankel, built on the belief that the up-and-down motion of pistons ...

As we begin the last article in this series on the basics of the internal combustion engine, let's stop to review what we've covered during the last five articles. We began last May by detailIing the ...