Rotary Valve - Use in Engine Design

Use in Engine Design

The rotary valve combustion engine possesses several significant advantages over the conventional assemblies, including significantly higher compression ratios and rpm, meaning more power, a much more compact and light-weight cylinder head, and reduced complexity, meaning higher reliability and lower cost. As inlet and exhaust are usually combined special attention should be given to valve cooling to avoid engine knocking.

Rotary valves have been used in several different engine designs. In Britain, the National Engine Company Ltd advertised its rotary valve engine for use in early aircraft, at a time when poppet valves were prone to failure by sticking or burning.

From the 1930s, Frank Aspin developed a design with a rotary valve that rotated on the same axis as the cylinder bore, but with limited success.

Kawasaki and others have also used rotary valves in two-stroke motorcycle engines, where the arrangement helps to prevent reverse flow back into the intake port during the compression stroke.

Austrian engine manufacturer Rotax used rotary intake valves in their now out-of-production 64 hp (48 kW) Rotax 532 two-stroke engine design and continues to use rotary intake valves in the 532's successor, the current-production 64 hp (48 kW) Rotax 582.

US company Coates International Ltd has developed a spherical rotary valve for internal combustion engines which replaces the poppet valve system. This particular design is four-stroke, with the rotary valves operated by overhead shafts in lieu of overhead camshafts (i.e. in line with a bank of cylinders). The first sale of such an engine was part of a natural gas engine-generator.

UK company RCV Engines Ltd uses rotating cylinder liner technology as a specialized form of rotary valve in their model engine and small-engine line-up.

Rotary valves are highly suitable for high reving engines, such as those used in sportscars and F1 racing cars, on which traditional poppet valves with springs can fail due to spring resonance and where the desmodromic valve gear is too heavy, large in size and too complex to time and design properly. Rotary valves allow for a more compact and lightweight cylinder head design. They rotate at half engine speed and lack the inertia forces of reciprocating valve mechanisms. This allows for higher engines speeds offering appr. 10% more power. The 1980s MGN W12 F1 engine used rotary valves but never raced. Between 2002 and 2004 the Australian developer Bishop Innovation and Mercedes-Ilmor tested rotary valves for a F1 V10 engine.

'Bishop Innovations' patent for the rotary valve engine was bought out by BRV Pty Ltd, owned by Tony Wallis, one of the valves original designers. BRV has constructed several functional motors using the rotary valve technology, such as a Honda CRF 450, which had greater torque at both low(17% increase) and high (9% increase) engine speeds, and also produced more brake horsepower up to around 30% more at functional engine speeds. The engine was also considerably smaller and lighter, as the cylinder head assembly was not as large.