Home▸Engineering & Materials▸The Wankel Rotary Engine Cycle

🔺 The Wankel Rotary Engine Cycle

Explore how Felix Wankel's rotary engine performs intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust using a spinning triangular rotor inside an epitrochoid housing instead of pistons, valves, and a crankshaft.

Engineering & Materials3DModerate60 FPS🔥 Fire

The simulator demonstrates how a single triangular rotor, spinning and orbiting inside an epitrochoid housing under a fixed 3-to-1 gear ratio, sweeps its three chambers through continuously offset intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust phases, and how this geometry alone reproduces the four-stroke cycle without pistons, valves, or a crankshaft.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Use the rotation control to spin the rotor and watch its three chambers change color as they pass through intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. Slow the speed down to follow a single apex seal tracing the epitrochoid housing wall, then speed it up to see how the three chambers overlap to deliver continuous power to the output shaft.

💡 Did You Know?

Mazda's rotary-powered 787B remains the only rotary-engined car ever to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright, in 1993, a feat that led motorsport's governing body to effectively ban the configuration from top-level endurance racing shortly afterward.

⚙ Under the hood

wankel enginerotary enginemazda rxepitrochoidcombustion cycleapex sealsengine designmechanical engineering

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install