This paper is a companion to my earlier article on a newly invented construction of internal combustion engine (ASME paper IMECE IMECE2008-66297 under a similar title), in which I presented my rotary positive displacement “turbine like” engines. In the present paper I concentrate on the construction of positive displacement oscilllating internal combustion engines based on the same newly invented mechanisms (the most compact and robust ones in existence, particularly well suited for coping with high loads) some variants of which were used in my rotary engines. The construction is intended for high power density Diesel engines (particularly special purpose, e.g. military ones), homogeneous charge compression ignition and detonation engines. The presented conception promises substantial improvement, in comparison with conventional piston engines, of such important engine parameters as swept volume/total volume, power/total volume and power/weight ratio, without increasing specific loads and thus without sacrificing engine's strength and reliability. Moreover, there exists a remarkable variety of engine's configurations within the proposed conception, namely oscillating engines utilizing flat or spatial mechanisms that can be combined with considerable variety of scavenging systems, ignition systems etc. Engines of the proposed structure have sealing almost as simple tight and reliable as conventional ones and much simpler, tighter and much more reliable than conventional (Wankel) rotary engines. The paper also touches upon the problems of balancing the engines of the presented invention.
The reason for presenting oscillating engines in a separate paper is their specific qualities that make these engines qualitatively different from their rotary counterparts. The most obvious of these qualities is a different mode of movement of engine's elements which causes some problems (e.g. the problem of balancing) are different in the two cases. Another of the qualities is that my oscillating engines, unlike their rotary counterparts, allows for naturally forming families of engines with different number of oscillators basing on one principal design, which makes the oscillating engine conception more universal. Moreover the oscillating engines are in some other aspects closer to ordinary piston engines and therefore would be easier for prototyping and manufacturing.
The paper is organized as follows. For reader's convenience I make the paper comprehensively self-contained by recalling in the first two sections some arguments and the basic constructions of the first part of the paper. In the final three sections, which constitute the core of the present paper, I give a detailed presentation of three variants of my oscillating engines.