Inside The Massive 15.7-Liter, 12-Rotor Engine: The One-Of-A-Kind Masterpiece To Take On The Chevy V8
The Wankel or rotary engine, partly made popular by the Mazda RX-7 and Mazda 787B racing car, has some obvious advantages over the common piston engine. Weight distribution, physical size, relative simplicity, and robustness all work in its favor. But frequent maintenance of key parts like the apex seals, relatively poor fuel economy/emissions and thermal inefficiencies are also well documented.
Lots of gearheads have made monstrously fast custom machines with multi-rotor setups. Now, YouTuber Rob Dahm returns with a new video breaking down the intricacies of the legendary 12-rotor engine.
He looks at the custom, one-off Frankenstein engine to see where he could improve it while showing the wider gearhead audience how one of the craziest engines ever built works.
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The 12-Rotor Engine Is Real, And Makes Serious Power
There are lots of myths around, such as the rumor that the engine makes 5,000 hp. For now, it doesn't make any power because it is in pieces. Rob Dahm inherited the engine from its maker, Tyson Garvin, who constructed the engine to resemble a Chevy big-block V8 in size but be more reliable.
Rob Dahm says early in the video: rotary engines are tough in naturally aspirated form, and only usually go wrong when forced induction gets introduced. This is partly because of the inherent thermal inefficiency of rotary engines, which Rob goes over in detail.
The amazing Wankel engine has the faux-V8 profile it does because it has three rows of quad-rotors, totaling 12 rotors, and displacing 15.7 liters. Dahm goes through the pistons, combustion chambers and crankshaft and investigates how the engine could get improved.
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This Is The Biggest Rotary Engine Ever, And It Keeps Getting Better
Via: YouTube via Rob Dahm
Dahm´s insight is impressive and judging by how many potential improvements he can come up with, the engine should be capable of enormous power. With turbocharging and healthy boost, the engine is theoretically capable of outputs like the mythical 5,000 hp.
Mazda's 13B is the most widely produced rotor engine, consisting of 2 rotors and a 1.3-liter total equivalent capacity. It could output from 255 hp to around 280 hp. The 12-rotor engine houses 12 rotors which are around 1.3-liters each, around double the displacement of the RX-7´s for each rotor. Stay tuned for more from Rob, and for those who are not engineering fans, the video is entertaining even for the high-level insight it provides on this amazing project.
For now, the sky is the limit on what this engine is eventually capable of doing.
Source: HotCars
