Wankel engine

An internal-combustion engine in which a triangular rotor turns inside an epitrochoidal chamber. Its rotating motion replaces the reciprocating pistons and valves of conventional engines.

Epitrochoid: A curve traced by a point attached to a circle rolling around the outside of another circle. The chamber wall follows an epitrochoidal curve, shaping the rotor’s changing working spaces.
Four-stroke engine: An internal-combustion engine that completes intake, compression, power, and exhaust strokes in each operating cycle. It provides a useful reference for comparing the Wankel’s overlapping chamber cycles.
Felix Wankel: A German engineer who developed the rotary engine design that bears his name. His chamber-and-rotor concept became the basis of the Wankel engine.
Mazda RX-7: A Mazda sports car produced from 1978 to 2002, offered with Wankel engines throughout its generations. The RX-7 became the best-known mass-produced rotary sports-car line.
Reciprocating engine: An engine that produces power through repeated back-and-forth motion of a piston or other component. The Wankel replaces reciprocating pistons with a continuously rotating rotor.
Wankel rotor: A roughly triangular rotating component whose faces form separate working chambers inside a rotary engine. Each rotor face successively draws in, compresses, ignites, and exhausts a charge.
Internal combustion engine: An engine that produces mechanical power by burning fuel inside a working chamber. The Wankel is one architecture within this broader family of engines.
NSU Motorenwerke: A German vehicle manufacturer that developed and produced early Wankel rotary engines. NSU collaborated with Wankel and brought rotary-engine vehicles to market.
Mazda RX-8: A Mazda sports car produced from 2003 to 2012 with a naturally aspirated Wankel engine. Its Renesis engine placed exhaust ports in the rotor housings to address earlier design trade-offs.
Piston engine: An engine in which one or more pistons move within cylinders to compress gases and produce power. Piston engines generally seal and control combustion more easily than Wankel engines.

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