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You are asking us to put it into terms of a cylinder/piston based engine.... that's like asking someone to descibe a Macintosh computer in terms of IBM based PC... you cant. Rotaries have a central shaft called a half shaft (I believe that's the correct term)... kinda like a crankshaft... but the rotors aren't connected to it, but they go around it. A rotor is kinda triangle shaped... 3 pointed ends. In the middle of the rotor is a large hole that fits around the half shaft. On each tip of the rotor you have an apex seal. Depending on the apex seal thickness you can have different compression levels. The shaft has either 1, 2, or 3 rotors (this would be like comparing a 4 cylinder engine to a 6 cylinder engine to an 8 cylinder engine). What is really special about the rotary engines is that they complete 1 complete combustion cycle in 1 revolution of the engine (meaning it pulls in air/fuel mixture, compresses the air/fuel mixture, ignites the air/fuel mixture to achieve combustion for power, then pushes the exhaust out). On a cylinder engine, for example the 300ZX engine, it takes 2 cycles of the engine for 1 complete combustion cycle... the piston goes up and down twice to do those 4 things (pull in air/fuel, compress, ignite, push out exhaust). That is why RX-7 engine's are classified as 1.3L but they put out HP like bigger engine's like Supra's and Skylines (and soon to be Z's hopefully). But that's really misleading... because in 1 revolution of the engine they produce 1.3L of displacement. If you look at a 300ZX engine or a Supra engine and break it up at 1 revolution of the engine then we can be classified as 1.5L engine's. So if your comparing a rotary engine to a piston driven engine you should compare at 2 cycles of the engine...so the RX-7 engine is really a 2.6L engine. But what is really cool about it is that the engine only has to be 1/2 the size physically because it's working twice as hard for each revolution of the engine it goes through. Hope this helped.
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11:42:16 02/11/01
