A Wankel engine is a type of rotary engine, but not all rotary engines are Wankel engines. Wrapping your mind around this idea will help you to better understand the similarities as well as the ...

The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

Rotary engines (also known as Wankel engines and Wankel rotary engines) are quite different from piston or "reciprocating" engines. One of the distinguishing features is that they don't need valves to ...

In theory, Wankel-style rotary internal combustion engines have many advantages: they ditch the cumbersome crankcase and piston design, replacing it with a simple, single-chamber design and a thick, ...

The Wankel rotary engine was made popular by Mazda, who built rotary style engines from in production cars such as the RX-7, ...

When it comes to unique engine designs, one of the most prolific is the trusty rotary configuration. Instead of featuring a number of spherical cylinders moving up and down like in most internal ...

Mazda made a splash in the market in 1990, launching the Eunos Cosmo with the three-rotor 20B engine. Compared with contemporary Wankel rotary engines, the 20B's extra rotor beefed the compact ...

For a time, the Wankel rotary engine seemed like the future. In 1963, German automaker NSU—later absorbed into Audi—debuted the Wankel Spider, the first internal-combustion production car not powered ...

For more than a decade the name Wankel has popped up whenever car enthusiasts start talking about advanced-design automotive powerplants. The theory of the Wankel engine goes back to 1954 when Dr.