How the Gnome rotary engines works

Want to know more about how the Gnome rotary works, here is a short video to show you more about it.

[timehunter]

A real rotary engine! Finally a video that mentions a rotary and doesn’t mean a Wankel engine! Thank you, these engines have always interested me, would love to restore one.

[deansawich]

Thanks for the great explanation of its operation. In my High-school days I was into WWI aircraft in a big way and when discussing engine types in Autoshop the Instructor berated me for telling him about a rotary engine where the full engine rotated around a fixed shaft as he was only familiar with radials and they made sense to him. Well, I kept my mouth shut after that but I knew he was dead wrong!

[rogerking]

That's a hell of a lot of rotating mass.

[robertmatch]

"Is that an engine or a flywheel?"

"Yes."

[rnedlo]

Not only is it ingenious, it's a beautiful work of art! Thank you.

[turbofan]

That was a great explanation, I never realised how the carburation worked before.

[bobbreit]

I would love to see some diagrams of that fuel delivery system. I have a good mechanical mind and it feels like some 2 stroke elements going on here. Very interesting.

[chuckmaddison]

Many thanks, I've been looking at Sopwith and realised the engine turns and not the crank.

[spencerderosier]

Best explanation I’ve heard of these esoteric contraptions

[vonhalberstadt]

Beautiful machining.
I was just speaking last week with some enthusiasts about the LeRhone and Oberusal licensed rotaries.
Brip, brip, braap.
Orémus.

[datasailor]

One of the best antique airshows is at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome north of New York City near Kingston, NY. They fly a variety of authentic aircraft dating as far back as 1909.

[Indarow]

So simple, yet so complex.

I had no idea these engines even existed before two days ago.
The idea of all the cylinders rotating around a fixed crank and cam shaft is something I never could’ve imagined.

I can see why the motor was ultimately abandoned, all that reciprocating mass the torque delivered to the aircraft must be pretty intense, and you’d lose a lot of power to parasitic drain just to rotate all those cylinder heads, but with the crank stationary I imagine the engine is incredibly smooth.

Absolutely fascinating.

[envitech]

Amazing technology for it's day! I'd suppose the fuel gets fed in through a central tube at the back. However the rotating crankcase made it into a gyro, which in turn made the plane very hard to control. It tends to roll to one side very easily, but to roll to other side takes a lot of effort and muscle power. This is coupled with the fact that these engines are either in idle or in full throttle.

[brentboswell]

One of the reasons that World War I aviators wore scarves is to keep them from having a severe case of diarrhea after flight: these engines were designed to be lubricated by castor oil. With open rockers, your face got covered with oil by the end of the flight. So caps, goggles and a scarf were important to keep you from injesting large quantities of castor oil 😉

[meditatingfish]

I've known rotary engines were used in planes, but until now, not had a good description of how the fuel was delivered to the cylinders. This removes the need for carburettors. Amazing technology!

[RBAERO]

Beautiful engine and piece of engineering.

[rags]

Amazing. I'm 61 and have been building Airfix models and playing wargames with this plane in it for almost 50 years and I only just now learned why it was called a "Monosoupape" !

[cramersclassics]

Awesome! Thank you for sharing. Amazing technology in so many ways, especially for 1915.

[alancartwright]

These radial engines were developed further, when built under licence in the UK, by one Lieutenant Walter Owen Bentley Royal Navsl Reserve. He applied the idea of using aluminium for the pistons to lighten things further and also help with cooling (with the engine rotating in the air, the leading side of the cylinder gets cooled better than the trailing side). These led to the UK BR1 and BR2 engines, fitted in later Sopwith Camels and Swift aircraft, from 1917 onwards. But the differential cooling, rotating mass, and gyro effect (reported by other contributor below), limited the power development of the rotary engine - particularly as other manufacturers were introducing the radial engine, where the cylinders are fixed and the crankshaft rotated.

[tsegulin]

Excellent discussion - thank you very much!
Can't say how much I appreciate outfits like this building working replicas of such historic engines. So see, hear (and smell) one running a century after they ceased to be used is just amazing. Gotta hand it to the original designers - the Gnome and Rhone engines and their Oberusel clones powered important aircraft right through World War One.