Felix Wankel

Felix Wankel (born Aug. 13, 1902, Lahr, Ger.—died Oct. 9, 1988, Lindau, W.Ger.) was a German engineer and inventor of the Wankel rotary engine. The Wankel engine is radically different in structure from conventional reciprocating piston engines. Instead of having pistons that move up and down in cylinders, the Wankel engine has a triangular orbiting rotor that turns in a closed chamber. Each quarter turn of the rotor completes an expansion or a compression of the gases inside the chamber, permitting the four functions characteristic of all internal-combustion engines—intake, compression, expansion, and exhaust—to be accomplished during one turn of the rotor. The only moving parts are the rotor and the output shaft. In theory, the advantages of this design include its light weight, few moving parts, compactness, low initial cost, fewer needed repairs, and relatively smooth performance.

Wankel never earned an engineering degree or acquired a driver’s license. The son of a forestry official in the Black Forest region of southern Germany, he grew up in straitened circumstances after his father was killed in World War I. As a young man, convinced that he could design a practical rotary engine (the concept was well known but usually dismissed as unworkable), he set up a small engineering business in Heidelberg while financing himself with other jobs such as bookselling. He was briefly a member of the Nazi Party before it rose to power. During the Nazi period and World War II he lived in Lindau, on Lake Constance (near the border with Switzerland), where he worked on designs for seals, unconventional rotary valves, and rotary engines for automobile and airplane engines. At various times he worked for the Daimler-Benz and BMW automobile companies as well as the German air force.

At the end of the war, Wankel’s workshop was dismantled by the Allied authorities, and in 1951 he began working in Lindau with the research department of an engine manufacturer, NSU Motorenwerk AG. He completed his first design of a rotary engine for NSU in 1954, and prototype units were tested in 1957 and 1958. In 1961 Mazda, a Japanese automobile company, contracted with NSU to produce and develop the Wankel engine in Japan. Rotary-engine Mazda cars were introduced to the Japanese market in the 1960s and to the American market in 1971. Wankel established a series of his own research establishments at Lindau, where he continued to work under contract for various companies on the fundamental problems and future applications of the rotary engine.

Wankel received a number of honours from engineering societies in Germany and abroad, and in 1969 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich. Committed all his life to antivivisectionism, Wankel in 1972 founded the annual or semi-annual Felix Wankel Animal Welfare Research Award for papers and projects related to animal welfare and the cessation of experimentation on live animals.