hi friends, on 14 October 2011 there was an exhibition organized by some 20 UAV manufactruing companies in New Delhi, India. It was wonderful to have something like this in India. The technology dispalyed was amazing. there were fixed wings and rotary winged UAV's. The show was won by this twin cylinder rotary engine designed for UAV's. The manufacturer claims to having nil vibrations in the engine. a very important issue for IMU's in the autopilot. beautiful engine with circular cross section and excellent cooling fins and fuel injected. runs on petrol as well ATF. amazing. Weight? only 2700gms with air intake and muffler. from outside looks like a turbine engine. more details on www.cubewano.com. It's a british company. a dream engine.
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Cubewnano does not exist any longer, anyway.
Ryan, your imprecise use of units is telling. Are you saying they are doing 5hp at 300-400g/hour? That's better than 100% efficiency... Even if you mean g/kW.h, you're quoting two figures which are 25-33% different from each other.
To put your claim into perspective, Schrick developed a 600cc V-twin UAV diesel engine (that is, compression ignition) with all the fruit - turbocharged, intercooled, DI - and they claim <330g/kW.h at full power and <300g/kW.h at part load - presumably their best point.
Now since engines don't improve in efficiency as you make them smaller (surface to volume ratios, friction and all that), why does anyone think that a 5hp SI engine running a kerosene-type fuel, which has an extremely low octane rating, will approach anywhere near these numbers...?
BTW, diesel has about the same energy density as gasoline - about 43MJ/kg. It is a more dense fuel though at 0.8kg/L compared with 0.72-0.74kg/L
DI can improve fuel consumption on a two-stroke engine a lot, but most of the effect is a part load. At full power, there is often a fuel consumption penalty to be paid for having it.
I know of engines putting out similar HP and only burn 300g to 400g hour at max throttle with port fuel injection. With direct/semi direct diesel injection you can get even better than than.
Direct injection can decrease fuel consumption by 30% to 40% for 2stoke/wankel engine and diesel has another 17% to 18% more energy density...do the math on that!
These engines are out of your league boys!
Sorry friends, it is single cylinder wankle rotray not a NOT twin cylinder. yes the specs are as follows: Single rotror wankle; power 4.8HP @ 9500 RPM; 98dB @ 1m; EFI via ECU; Fly-by-wire bi directional system control; fuel type is petrol and ATF; air cooled; integral generator as option; very very low vibrations; auto altitude compensation; manufactured to aerospace standards. yes i did ask the price. only humble $18000. see the running on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cin7wVdd2iY
Any details on pricing? Looks really nice. Rotary engines were very good in certain cars, but these were gasoline fueled.
Did you see it running?
Website is long on bling, but a bit light on specifications, and specifications are everything!
Loads of people claim to be able to do heavy fuel (JP8, Jet-A, Kerosene) but few people can actually do it and those that do tend to set the grass on fire with high exhaust temperatures.
I cannot imagine how such a small wankel engine running on kerosene could actually delivery less than 360g/kW.h (0.6lb/hp.h) across its operating envelope
Call me a cynic...