Circle Cycle Internal Combustion Engine

Despite its detractors predicting its demise for decades, the internal combustion engine keeps going and going; its basic design unchanged since the days of Nikolaus Otto.  Recently, some weird and wonderful new variations on the old theme have cropped up (though, I haven't seen them make any commercial success... yet), and the Circle Cycle Engine is the weirdest one yet.

We haven't looked at any new internal combustion engines for a while and I just spotted this one, the Circle Cycle engine. It's described as an orbital, non-reciprocating internal combustion engine, having pistons and cylinders and able to run on a variety of combustible liquids or gasses. It has no engine block, no crankshaft or connecting rods, no separate flywheel, no intake or exhaust valves, no water pump and no radiator or any of the hardware usually associated with these items.

The engine uses direct injection of fuel into the center of the combustion chamber and it can be configured to run as either spark ignition or diesel. Potential applications, according to the website, are pretty much what you would expect, which is anything you would use any other internal combustion engine for.

I can't even begin to describe the operation of this engine in words, so just check out this animation.



It looks pretty amazing, but the good old Otto and Diesel engines have 100+ years of refinement conducted all over the world by thousands of very smart people (engineers, master mechanics, garage tinkerers, etc.) on their side.  It's highly unlikely that any new design will succeed against those odds.  I'd love to see it happen, so I hope I'm wrong.