The Rand Cam engine is a very simple, powerful and potentially very
efficient rotary internal combustion engine,
currently under development by a company called Regi Technologies.
One of their first prototypes, which is about 6 inches across and
weighs only about 18kg, runs on diesel fuel and develops about as
much power as the engine in our little Fiat Punto. Not too shabby.
It's valveless, and has (depending on how you count them) of the
order of 13 moving parts, a high power to weight ratio and is
incredibly quiet in operation. So, naturally enough, Regi have scooped
up a lot of funding for development from the military sector for use
in unmanned spy planes.
And, like all of the truly great ideas, it's simple enough that it
makes you want to smack your forehead and say "Hey, why didn't I think
of that?"
Principle of operation
So, how does it work? The fundamental operation of the thing is still
the good old-fashioned 4-stroke Diesel variant of the Otto cycle:
induce air into a variable-volume chamber, compress the air by
contracting the size of the chamber, introduce fuel and ignition to
increases temperature and pressure in the chamber and thus exert force
against a load while the chamber expands, and then the exhaust is
evicted from the chamber.
Reciprocating IC engines have a cylindrical chamber, with a piston
which moves in that chamber to alter its volume and achieve
compression and power extraction. The Rand Cam engine has none of
that, so I can't really compare it to a reciprocating engine. Instead,
I'll compare it to a Waltzer.
Yes, a Waltzer.
If you've ever been to a fairground, the chances are you've ridden
on, or at least seen a Waltzer. The Waltzer is a ride with rotating
carriages mounted on a segmented floor which undulates up and down as
the ride turns round: the supports for the floor ride over a static
but sinusoidally undulating track, or cam, and as the floor surface
rotates, it follows this track up and down, getting closer to the
ceiling as it reaches the top of the cam, and falling further away
from the ceiling as it falls back down to the low point of the cam.
And this is the essence of the Rand Cam engine's operation.
The engine, just like a waltzer, is generally cylindrical, with a
rotor turning on a central axis. The bottom surface of the combustion
chamber is fixed and doesn't rotate, just like the track on the
waltzer. The rotor has a disk which corresponds roughly with the
position of the ceiling of the Waltzer, forming the top surface of the
combustion chamber. Held in slots in the rotor, 12 vertical vanes, which divide
the engine radially into 12 chamber segments, like the hour markings in a
clock. As the rotor turns, these vanes move up and down in their
slots, riding along the bottom surface of the chamber (the cam),
carrying with them a quantity of gas which is compressed into a small
volume as the vanes ride to the high points of the cam, and expands
again as they ride to the low points.
I'll attempt to illustrate through the magical medium of ASCII
art. If we were to 'unwrap' the engine along the surface of the
cylinder, here's an approximation of what we'd see:
. . .
| | . . | | . . | ←---- vertical vanes
-|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|- ←-- rotor disk top surface
_|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|_ ←-- rotor disk bottom surface
----|_ | | |_----|_ | | |__-- ←--- bottom cam
--__|_-- --__|_--
---------------------------------
The engine's chamber is formed between the bottom surface of the rotor
disk, and the top surface of the bottom cam, and the 12 vertical vanes
divide this up into 12 individual chambers.
The cam has two peaks and two troughs (think
'sin(2θ)') around its circumference. Starting at the
first peak, as the rotor turns the vanes will ride downwards, causing
the chamber segment to expand. So, between the first peak and the
first trough of the cam, there's an intake port cut into the cam
through which air is drawn: making this the induction stroke of the
Diesel cycle.
As the trailing vane nears the trough, it passes the end of the intake
port and the chamber is once again sealed.
Riding up the cam towards the peak, the air in the chamber segment is
compressed, heating up in accordance with Boyle's Law.
Just after the second peak, when the air is at its most dense, there
is a fuel injection port in the cam. Through this, diesel fuel is
sprayed, igniting in the already hot air and increasing the
temperature and thus pressure of the gas in the chamber. As the
leading vane of the chamber is further down into the trough than the
trailing vane, still close to the peak, it has more exposed surface
area, resulting in a net force pushing the rotor in the direction it
was already turning: and so this forms the power stroke.
The rotor continues turning through the power stroke to the bottom of
the second trough of the cam, where the chamber stops expanding. The
segment of the cam which defines the slope back up towards the first
peak has an exhaust port cut into it, so as the vanes ride up the
slope, the chamber contracts and pushes the remaining exhaust gas out
through the exhaust port, until the chamber reaches the top of the
first peak, and the cycle begins again.
Since the vanes divide the engine into 12 chambers, there are 12 such
cycles per revolution of the rotor, hence the claim of 13 moving
parts: a rotor and 12 vanes.
You may have spotted one or two little problems with this so
far. First, there's the small matter of the top ends of these
vanes. The bottom ends ride along the surface of the cam, but what
keeps them against that surface?
The answer is that the engine is approximately symmetrical: the
rotor's top is another disc, through which the top ends of the vanes
protrude, and their top surfaces ride along a cam, the mirror image of
the bottom cam and rotated through 90 degrees so that the top cam's
peaks correspond to the bottom cam's troughs, keeping a constant
distance (equal to the total height of a vane) between the two cam
surfaces. So, as the vanes ride the downward slope of the bottom cam, they are pushed firmly against the cam surface by the 'upward' slope of the top cam, and vice versa.
Clever? I thought so.
Thus the engine has a total of 24 combustion chambers (12 on the top,
12 on the bottom) and a total of 24 combustion and exhaust events per
cycle, making for a very smooth, very quiet system.
Far simpler than a piston engine, it has no valves (only ports), and
because the fuel injection port is not connected to the compression
part of the cycle, fuel injection can be almost continuous, vastly
simplifying the mechanical components of the fuel injection
system. This also makes it incredibly clean-burning.
The weak point, much like the Wankel rotary engine, is the sealing
between the cam and the vanes: these surfaces continually move against
each other, and are pushed together by the inertia of the vanes
themselves with a force proportional to the mass of the vanes and the
speed of the rotor, so will be liable to wear, and degradation of the
seal between these will cause power and efficiency losses.
At least one independent company is working with Regi, investigating materials-oriented solutions to these problems. Because the characteristics of the Rand Cam engine are so different from those of reciprocating engines, different materials may be used. In particular, since combustion can be continuous, percussive ignition is eliminated, making it viable to use low-friction, hard-wearing ceramic materials which would be considered too brittle to be used in a piston engine.
Since there are no valves, and the fuel handling system can be vastly
simplified compared to today's existing systems, a Rand Cam engine can
be incredibly flexible about its choice of fuel. The prototypes have
been running on diesel fuel, but with minor modifications to the
fuel system, it could burn SVO, ethanol, LPG, hydrogen, or
almost anything else that might come to hand. Hell, even petrol if
there's any of that shit left.
Although prototype engines so far have been normally aspirated,
there's absolutely nothing to stop a Rand Cam engine from being fitted
with a turbocharger or super turbo.
The first prototype of this engine was only fired up in 2005, and
things look to be moving quickly, so we should expect to see a lot
more interesting development during the next year or so.
More information and propaganda than you could shake
a pinch of salt at is available on
Regi's website, including pictures, diagrams, and the rather impressive
videos for drumming up investment capital, featuring a couple of
actors and a bloke in a garage and a baseball hat, who I presume is
the inventor of the thing.