That is a very interesting collection of photos and videos indeed. The difficulty with just about all of these engines is that the mechanical losses (internal friction) inherent in their designs is just about the same as the amount of power they can produce, which leaves little extra power available to drive a road wheel or power a propellor. Either that, or they have such poor volumetric efficiency that you cannot get the mixture to reliably combust and they have horrendous emissions characteristics.
About once a month or so, for many years, I would get calls from folks who had invented a new type of engine - all they needed was $10 million to build a prototype. My secretary even coined a 3-letter acronym for them: WIC (which stands for Wacky Inventor Call).
One guy actually DID build a prototype which functioned - sort of. He must have spent several hundred thousand dollars of his own money on machining and fancy animated videos. He claimed that his engine would run on any fuel and that it would have zero emissions while producing 40% more power than any other engine, pound for pound. It looked like a beer keg and had a bunch of hoses and wires sticking out of it. The thing was "powered" by a 10 HP electric motor and when he ran it - nothing would happen for about 10 seconds and then an enormous jet of flame would erupt from the exhaust port along with an amazingly loud BANG!
I asked him what the electric motor was for - aside from use as a starter - and he said "Well, without it the engine doesn't run". It turned out that he had the intake and exhaust port timing all wrong. When I pointed this out to him, he said: "Oh, that's engineering stuff and I don't know anything about that". What he had created was actually a machine for processing gasoline (or in fact, any fuel), into noise. Too bad - no lucrative consulting contract for Pete on that one.
I guess there is a reason why just about all engines work on just about the same set of principles. Nikolaus Otto and Rudolf Diesel had it right back in the 19th century - with minor variations along the way.
Cheers,
Pete
