What you see here are the inner workings of the Waissi Engine. It’s named for its inventor, Gary Waissi, an engineering professor at Arizona State University who thinks that things like “connecting rods” are silly wastes of reciprocating mass and (therefore) thermal energy moochers.
The short version is that this new Waissi engine is visually similar to (and, it should be noted, similar in concept to) the Ecomotors’ opposed piston engine currently being tested by the British Navy. As such, it’s an internal-combustion “boxer” design like those in Subarus and Porsches that uses conventional head, valve and combustion chamber designs. What’s different here is that Waissi’s engine has no connecting rods between the pistons and the crankshaft. Instead, the pistons push directly on what Waissi calls a “crankdisk”. When one piston is pushed inward during the power stroke, the movement of the piston causes the crank to spin because of the offset as the bearing ring rolls under the piston landing. Each piston has an opposed twin which then spins the crank disk another 180 degrees to complete a revolution. The pistons are attached to each other via a hard connection, which keeps them timed properly.
It’s a lot to take in, for sure – but I’ve got professor Waissi’s full SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) presentation slideshows, below, which should do a MUCH better job of explaining the principles involved in his Waissi engine than I can …
… so, yeah. That’s pretty much everything. You can find a more carefully thought-out “lay person” explanation over at the original SAE conference coverage of the innovative new Waissi engine at the Truth About Cars.
Source | Images: the Truth About Cars.
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