Coates International Rotary Cylinder Head

[cowboy bebop]

Has anyone ever heard of this? A friend gave me the link yesterday, and I've never seen anything like this. I'm sure it's expensive, but it looks like a work of art.

Link:
http://www.coatesengine.com/csrv.html

 

[Matt Skinner]

Rotary valves are cool. Used to be fairly common on Bristol Aero Engines but never made it into the automotive mainstream. I've got a single cylinder rotary valve engine knocking about somewhere, different design to that though!

 

[turboteener]

Race Engine Tech has covered the Coates rotary engine in several articles, Looks like a very promising technology. One problem with the rotary valve is the vectoring of fuel air mixture into the combustion chamber. But you can eliminate the inertia of the valvetrain. This is one of the major hurdles to rpm in standard poppet valve engines.

 

[turboteener]

My bad it wasn't the Coates system but the Roton System. I tend to like the Roton system a little better. Check out www.rotonusa.com

 

[cowboy bebop]

It is very interesting technology, although I can't see it making it onto our motors anytime in the near future for any reasonable price. My quesion would be how do the injectors factor into this, and is there a proper atomoization prior to entering the combustion chamber.

Eric

 

[cribbj]

Rotary/spherical valve heads were one of the tightest R&D projects we had at Cooper in the late 80's. These things are really well suited to natural gas engines and direct cylinder injection. I wouldn't begin to try to do one of these with liquid fuel or manifold port injection.

It looked like a very promising technology back then if the well known problems of sealing and lubrication could have been overcome. When you start spinning a glorified ball valve in its seat at 1/4 crank speed, you really need some good materials and technology to keep the thing sealed against combustion pressures and temperatures for 2000 hours of operation.

The unobtanium materials that didn't exist in the 80's may be available now to make it viable.


John

 

[TundraEddie]

Wow,I remember reading about the coates rotary head more than 10 years ago. There were some really good things said about it,I was really looking forward to seeing it used in production engines. It was in an all-engine magazine I bought,articles reprinted from several of the publisher's magazines. This magazine even had a V16 based on two SBC engines. If I remember correctly,they put the heads on a Ford engine and gained a whole lot of torque and some really high rev limit (well over 10K). I see they're still in NJ,wonder if they'd let me snoop around the facility

I know I still have the magazine somewhere,I just need to dig for it LOL.