#i also have been regularly donating to help palestinian civillians gain access to esims as well as menstrual products

[locrianking]

kill yourself Zionist and stay the fuck off my blog.

i’m gonna assume you already know the basic principles of combustion engines: intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. in standard piston engines, all of the space in the cylinder handles all of those jobs. rotary engines are similar, but each of those jobs occur in different parts of the housing.

the most important parts to know are the rotor, which is the triangle part everyone jokes about, which has three, convex faces, the housing, which is a weird oval shape (also called a epitrochoid!) and is specifically designed so that the three tips of the rotor will always be in contact with it, and the output shaft, which has these lobes on it which the rotor is mounted onto. the housing also contains the exhaust port, and the center piece of the housing contains the intake port.

so, rotary engines use the same four-stroke cycle that piston engines use, they just go about it in a really funny way! as the rotor rotates throughout the housing, it creates three chambers that change size throughout the revolutions, not unlike how the up-down motions of pistons change the size of their chambers as they move.

air/fuel enters the engine through the intake port when the rotor passes by it, and that chamber gets progressively bigger until the peak of the rotor passes, at which point it is sealed off. after that, the volume/chamber begins to shrink and the air/fuel mixture gets compressed as the face of the rotor gets closer to the spark plugs. yes, plural! rotary engines have 2 spark plugs instead of 1! the rotor’s face reaches the spark plugs and then we have combustion! combustion creates gases that need to expand, and the chamber for that grows as the rotor continues along its way. this is where power is created btw! eventually the rotor passes by the exhaust port, all of those gases leave the chamber as exhaust.

here’s a gif from wikipedia if you’re a visual learner:

rotary engines are super neat! their most well-known usage has been in mazda sports cars, mainly the rx-7 and rx-8 (fun fact: the rx stands for “rotary experiment”!) but also from the legendary mazda 787b herself. they’re not the most efficient or reliable engines, but they’re beautiful in and of themselves and i’m so excited that mazda has continued to carry on the legacy of the rotary. i can’t wait to see what we do with this technology in the future :DD