Thermodynamic Modeling of the Meyer Nutating Engine (Paperback)

The purpose of this project was to develop a tool to model the performance of the Meyer nutating engine. A new type of internal combustion engine, this engine replaces the pistons with a nutating, or wobbling, disk. Contact between the disk and the engine walls create the chambers for compression and expansion. The disk's motion causes the volumes of these chambers to change, causing air intake, compression, expansion, and exhaust to take place. In the process of creating a program to do this, thermodynamic relationships were determined and incorporated into an Engineering Equation Solver computer model. This allows designers to see the performance of differently-sized engines at various engine speeds and altitudes. This model was verified against a MATLAB model, showing good agreement at mid range engine speeds and comparisons were made to current engines. The nutating engine showed significant weight savings over current engines of the same power.