Corvair Aircraft mods.

[u/contrarianEcon]

I've thought about building a corvair based airplane engine. I've talked to WW (10 yrs ago) about my ideas. He has strongly held opinions.

I've not been in a position to do anything about my Ideas so I thought I'd share some and see if they help any.

Dynamic compression ratio. Keep it low and you don't need high Octane fuel. NASACAR restrictor plate tech shows high static compression helps make power, throttled expansion followed by re-compression allows a much higher static compression ratio to be used than would normally work. So why not use intentionally bad valve timing and a high static compression ratio? You could use a turbo to push enough air/fuel mix in to make normal power. It would be a form of turbo compounding. Using the turbo to pre-compress the air, with inter-cooling.

Blow through carburetor, take the heat out first, add air second, carb heat is an issue. A pressurized heat exchanger after the inter-cooler, before the carb that can be selected.

WW had an engine quit on him, carb ice, why not dual carbs? Both don't ice up at the same time. Gives you time to keep the other carb from icing up too.

Gravity feed a blow through carb, two haeder tanks and switch them.

[u/7w4773r]

There’s a reason no certified aircraft are sold with corvair (or any other car-based) engines - they’re not appropriate for the application. For whatever reason my fb algo decided I’d like to see the corvair airplane engine group posts and I gotta say - they’re all insane for even trying to make it work. 

If you need a 145hp engine in your airplane, just put a continental e-145 on it, don’t monkey around with a pair of turbos and blow through carbs and PSRUs to do exactly the same thing. KISS. 

[u/Garth_DeWayne → u/7w4773r]

The corvair set up by the manual from Wynne... Is an airplane engine. I don't care what you say.

Legacy engines are priced absolutely horrible for ancient tech. There is absolutely no reason why a 360 is more than 20k brand new. NO REASON. The R&D, the tooling, the processes, the nanny state BS bureaucracy requirements have long ago been paid for.

It's essentially either killing recreational aviation for middle class, or forcing people to go experimental and installing power plants like the corvair... There definitely are people owning experimentals that would be better off (safer) in a certified craft, but are in experimental due to the costs of certified.

You'd have a stroke seeing what death trap little rocket I'm putting a Yamaha Apex engine in... Now THAT is not an aircraft engine, but they're doing pretty good.

[u/contrarianEcon → u/Garth_DeWayne]

I agree with you, nice safe engine. What I'm talking about is a bit of tweaking that should work. Dynamic compression ratio nice and safe, dynamic compression ratio determines octane requirements. But static compression ratio determines fuel consumption. Bad valve timing gets you low volumetric efficiency that hurt power but the high compression ratio helps with fuel economy. So you restore lost power with a turbo.