Im not an engineer but i just had a dream of an engine similar to this while napping and when i woke up and started searching for other designs like this an came across this video 😮

And probably makes the best sound ever, too! "waka waka waka waka waka waka waka"

There is one kind. The thermal plastic used for oil drilling ball bearings is your best bet. Microwaves are used to hardened the material and is light green before the process and turn black afther the part cures. Not cheap but maleable and is not a heat or volt conductor. Behaive good with friction as long is lubricated with prolong lubricants. Good luck with your proyect.

Swiss Genius, like Gold, but from the Mind! Congratulations, spotless idea & Animation, made my day!

thats really cool i never thorght of combustion working in theis way but dose look like a intresting idea

I like it. the whole combustion chamber is the flywheel. I would think that it would be very efficient. By eliminating valves, timing chains, dozens of bearings, your reducing friction in the combustion process. Looking forward to see a working prototype.

Maybe think of the practicality of this engine on a larger scale. Imagine if it was the size of a house, and powered some sort of amazing humanoid mech? It would rotate at a slower speed and perhaps have oil ports throughout the design to provide cooling. Also the gyro effect would be useful in keeping the machine upright. Okay, a giant mech would not be very practical, but it would be sweet!!!!

This reminds me a little of the 'Tower Spherical Engine'. A design of steam engine that saw use running carriage lighting dynamo's for the now non existant Great Eastern Railway in England. The Tower Sherical Engine can be seen at the 'Museum of Retrotech' website!

This thing blows me away every time. I think the idea came from those baseball happy meal toy puzzles. I could never get those things to stay together.

Gonna have bore seal problems similar to the Wankel. Wear levels will be high on the bores, balls and grooves.

@MrHurricaneFloyd

9 жыл бұрын

***** I think they are depending on the ceramic material too much in their design.

It may have fewer parts than a traditional piston engine (at least that's what they claim) but look at those parts. A machinists nightmare. All those curved surfaces that require tight tolerances. Much more difficult to produce I would think. Then I would investigate whether all that centrifugal force generated at high speed would be problem.

@yaboi269

5 жыл бұрын

centripetal

@yaboi269

5 жыл бұрын

@WaffulMann Not an expert, just some college physics. Thought I was just pointing out a basic misunderstanding lol

@m_6866

3 жыл бұрын

@WaffulMann Ima fucking necro-post your ass. It is centripetal. That is that. Centrifugal is not a thing, it is centripetal force from a different frame of reference and using it is just lazy and wrong. If you don't want to use the correct frame of reference then just don't bother at all. It is like getting the answer half right and saying its correct.

@stellieford6183

2 ай бұрын

3D printing

Kugelmotor on a motorcycle would be the best aplication

Oh look! A Pacman engine!

This is THE coolest thing I've ever seen.

Thermal expansion will be fun for that engine.

@Descentia yes it did as it expanded, it pushed on the ceramic balls making the thing spin faster, driving the piston movement.

Any further development on this design? 3d printing and metalworking has innovated a lot since this was posted.

@georgewashingtonisalive

3 жыл бұрын

I’m pretty curious myself

@msgstar4933

2 жыл бұрын

I saw a video recently

i wouldn't mind hearing the exhaust note from that thing. pretty koo.

this thing could create it's own gravity.

when are we going to get a choice of anti-matter warp drives in our subcompact hatchbacks?

@techstuf4637

4 жыл бұрын

Jokingly, I told a friend that this one runs on methane. He replied, "methane my arse!"

cool internal combustion engine

may only be 3 moving parts, but its the most convoluted thing I've ever seen lol.

Wow cool engineering!

@Nimtar100 The explosion in the chambers that the ceramic balls are attached to. Basically, it tries to force them outwards, but because they are attached to the ceramic balls and on tracks it forces it to move in the direction of the tracks. Its really hard to explain on youtube.

Gasoline literally summons bands of orcs and sends them off to kill polar bears.

It might have some problems but i still think that it is an amazing idea

@powerimprint that is where the fuel-air is sucked in and as it goes to sparkplug it is compressed

yea, it was meant to show that the german/swiss engineering style is often easily recognized by people who have experience working with said style. (I once showed a rotary design to a young mechanic friend who said "...Mazda?!...Looks like something a German came up with...") I laughed rather hard when he made this comment

i think that is what they were thinking with the ceramic guide balls. all would need lube is the main shaft butterfly piston bearings.

3 moving parts with no mention of the thousands of seals needed

Possibly, but the same action that drives the pistons also vents the exhaust. The only problem I see is that the strain of internal combustion could fracture the ceramic balls, which is why I'd use iron coated in rubber, or aluminum/titanium, not ceramic. Something less brittle, but then there's the weight cost. It is also a simpler engine, so less experienced mechanics could get it running if it does fail. Hell, I could build one of these.

Although there are many different ways to design an engine the popular piston engine is favoured only because it is easy to manufacture. One can only imagine how it may be if only the manufactures had all put money into perfecting some of these other great designs. Unfortunately the only engine the manufacturers would be interested in developing is one which is cheaper to make.

beautiful

Some concerns about this design: 1. All the power is via shear forces through the ceramic balls. It is is quite likely the balls will break under this force. 2. The force of the explosion will push the end caps apart, causing a great deal of friction and wear between them and the engine casing. 3. There is a lot of friction between the balls and the sides of their channels, which will cause of wear. 4. This engine has a very large inertial mass for a relatively small combustion chamber.

Theoretically, a motor with two rotating assemblies phased 90 degrees apart would give power strokes spaced the same number of degrees apart as a V-8.

@Rakemaan In fact it might be more practical to run it as two stroke given the lubricating/sealing problems to overcome here.

@Leonidae it really does looks rotary in design, but seems even less efficient

@chapmansbg plus you would have to take expansion of the metal in to account when running at high Rpm..

@fifitrixibellenz You overlooked the exaust port. It is on only one side of the engine. If it ran the opposite way, as soon as the sphere just passed its power stroke, the pressure would lock the sphere in place.

It was built by the Swiss, who have knives that are complex, but they work, too.

i cant imagine it's more efficient, but it does look cool

Fixing that is gonna be a REAL pain in the ass !

One clear flaw I see is the amount of surface area susceptible to friction/wear. Just cannot be efficient enough with that level of surface friction to combustion volume. Very cool idea though.

The Monotracer has balls. lmfao

Wow! That is really cool. If we put two of those motors togather. Plus incorperate some electric hybride technology. I think we would have a Miracle in efficience. If it can prove to be reliable...

it is incredibly cool

I entered your data into the Sphinctomatic 3000, and it is certain that you will achieve exactly 167% efficiency when it breaks through your mythbusters lexan viewing window. Definitely 167%. In science, all data is good data. Even data that smashes a 200 pound piece of lexan on top of you as it explodes at "half the RPM"

So that's what's in that ball on my Dyson.

Ah, I should have watched the whole video. Anyway, reminds me of rotary engines, with apex/face seal issues. Those S-shaped guides and the little "lumps" that run in them also look like a source of trouble. Good luck.

I can't post any illustrations here, but you can look up air motors to see what they look like inside. I did a very easy mathematical derivation yet somewhat clever which illustrates the principle of operation. I'm writing all this because It looks to me that the answer is staring everyone right in the face and there is no need for all these complicated efforts!

Brilliant. Now, if we can do the same thing with a figure 8 configuration. The V-8 version, so to speak. :)

Why do you think there would be "virtually no wear"? The opposite is likely to be true given that 1. There is a large contact area with no way of lubricating it 2. The small balls scrape hard against the channel sides 3. The swarf from worn parts will end up between moving parts 4. Chipped ceramic parts will cause A LOT of wear to the parts they scrape against If the casing fails first, it is a design flaw that the part that fails quickly is the biggest and most expensive part.

crazy design took a lil´while to understand it haha I´d love to see a running engine!

I like it. It might work. They perfected the watch :P

If you made an engine in the configuration just like the standard air motors in air tools it would have many advantages. A spark plug would only be needed to start it. It would have a power rotor and compression rotors on each end and a manifold between them with tiny holes in the housing separating the rotors such that if gases escaped around the ends of the power rotor they would leak back into the compression rotors and thus be recycled. The rotors might be fairly cylindrical shaped.

Man.. I'd hate to work on that thing! That's a really cool design though : )

Cool and crazy idea. Anyway brilliant. What about heat accumulation in the "ball"?

"for an equally amazing vehicle." What vehicle? A link please?

if you showed this to a large grp of mechanics and asked them all who they thought made it, i bet most of them would say either swiss or german

That was my first thought too.

Totaly agree also. Manufacturing would be a bastard. And we think the wankel is a dificult one to do!REALLY nice job on the solid works visuals!

Quelle folie furieuse!!!!

@TyCobbweb It's a long combustion chamber. So it's better to use two spark plugs for a more regular ignition. Look up my the engine of an Honda NR. It has oval pistons and also two spark plugs.

you could use a ball bearing on the mains but i think they would wear out too quickly because of the immense stress put on them. the journal bearing is used because of the principle that a liquid can't be compressed. also a liquid will not wear out under high pressures and as long as there is liquid in the journal, there bearing will keep functioning. but i agree with you that there are few places on an engine that use a ball type bearing

most engine designer get 2 things right the varing chambers for intake compression,ect. its rotary design spins nice but they very seldom do not consider the torque during the power stroke

Very interesting concept and really great idea. If I understand correctly, when ignition strokes, the pressure is pushing cheramic balls in the grooves, and this makes it spin. Any Idea how long will the grooves and the balls last? But anyway, realy interesting concept. I'd like to see one working.

This engine was so refined and excellent, a striped jar of grape jelly and peanut butter together side by side was named after it, ... or was the engine named after the product?

brilliant

10 out of 10 for Revolutionary 0 out of 10 for Renewability

This may have huge friction surfaces, but it also has no reciprocal movement, causing a vast increase in efficiency. The only big problem I see is metal expansion.

in theory, it should actually have zero vibration. if you look at the way the, um, pistons i guess, move, they oppose each others motion, like Chinook helicopter blades. then the central ball rotates in a constant direction,producing a gyroscope like effect, which could make it hard to maneuver. as far as torque, well, i don't see why it couldn't be comparable to conventional piston engines

@snowdogjdc i think the same. Transmit the power over little balls to a rotation is not very efficient. But a nice idea.

The advantages would be: extremely easy to manufacture, continuous firing so high power to weight ratio, no recipricating parts or valve mechanisms. Leakage from one segment to the next would be little problem since low pressure gradient between adjacent segments. Cooling could be a challenge; my thoughts are to use soluble oil for lubricant. Sealing is no longer a problem due to my new design of allowing (if any) escaping gases to leak into the compression rotors and thus be recycled.

Very fun theroy

Scrotch33: Electric power is the key to the future. All we need to do is find better/cheaper ways of getting it transmitted and stored.

Pretty animation. Is there video of a running engine? Has there been a test of a few thousand hours running?

Looks good, my only concerns is the overall size of the packet for only two chambers, how you would stack more chamber?

@popcornlagace Do you even undersytnd the complete concept of the recriprocating piston engine? I knew another guy that said "They are all figured out", he was also wrong. Battieries require a form of ionized metal (probably nickel). Which is mined in the states, sent to germany for refining, and sent to japan to make batteries. All of this is done using "polar-bear killing" super ships that traverse the seven seas.

The Pac-Man Engine!! =))

very very nice

awesome design!, im only worried about the cooling system, the friction are very high.

I think it's brillaint!

actually, an american designed this form of engine. the swiss just made it run off of combustion instead of steam.

bY this count, a tradtional engine only has two moving parts. They cooling on this would be quite an amuzing challenge. The seals would be less fun. But against this, it looks cute. I like the ceramic ball guides to control compression. I would give it a B+ on the senior design project. Nice, but it is a solution to a problem that does not exist.

thats the most awesome engine i ever seem, but i have a question after the spark plug ignite the fuel and air in the opening part, does the force expend the 2 part and give momentum for the ball to spain?

I want one!

Interesting concept but I can see that it will have the same limitations as any other reciprocating engine. Mass must start, stop and change direction 180 degrees.

@Alembic25 I would imagine it takes in an air/fuel mixture, not just air. But it doesnt specifically state that, just speculation

@Cdabek the load...same as most 1 cyl engines...

Nice design! Has it been produced? If so, how fuel efficient is it?

nice design, does look like getting compression might be an issue. not sure if they will get the same compression as traditional pison engines but i would also think it will have a higher power to weight ratio as well. wonder how much the guide balls will wear as well. with some refinment it could be an awsome motor. and if you can get the same compression as pison engines then it should be a more efficent design. im my opinion anyway. love to see a prototype of this working

This is very cool! However, it looks like you better have the timing set from the beginning of design.

There is just few decades left for internal combustion engine to exist. Soon after 2055 oil will run out then natural gas will exist alternative for a brief period of time for 10-15. Then things will be very tough.

i think there may be a little problem with the exhaust. you may be interested in finding a quick way to expel the burnt gas. i don't much will be able to pass through that small hole in such a small amount of time.

Thermal plastic would work, but I would think it would also wear down faster, forcing you to get new bearings. That's why I chose metal, so that it wouldn't wear down as fast. But if there's a thermal plastic that can withstand that kind of wear, I'd use it.

So basically a heart

I had the same thoughts like where's the crankcase oil stored or it must be like a two stroke using an oil mix. Lots of fancy machine work for an engine with a short lifespan. I see no way to rebuild it after it's worn out like a conventional engine can be re-bored and fitted with new pistons and such. The conventional piston engine is a simple design that works well with only moderate machine work to make, no fancy CNC stuff like this would require.

Felicitaciones, parece una buena idea... pero aun pierdes energía por el desperdicio de la inercia, si bien es cierto que no tienes un pisto que va y viene aquí tienes los metales que se alejan y luego se contraen, es igual van y vienen... pero si creo que ya no tendrá muchas vibraciones y podría funcionar con diésel también

Nice. How are the chambers/spaces sealed each fron another?

не знаю насчет КПД, но ресурс без использования дорогих материалов будет небольшим. А с их использованием - ДВС дорогой. Плюс на воплощение "в серию" этого движка уйдет много времени, когда на пятки наступают гибриды,электромобы и водородники