Here is a fun and illuminating article for those of us that value and wish to save the internal combustion engine.
Click the link to watch the Transient plazma ignition system as opposed to the standard spark plug.
Could 1980s technology keep internal-combustion engines on the road?
Kyle Smith
20 January 2022
Share
Read enough automotive-related articles on the internet and you will be convinced the internal-combustion engine is being hunted with a fervor typically reserved for villains in Liam Neeson movies. Okay, that conclusion may be extreme—but it holds some truth. Regulations regarding emissions and engine efficiency grow stricter with each passing year and manufacturers are faced with an impossible task: Take a centuries-old design and make it endlessly better—faster, cleaner, stronger, ad infinitum. At some point, progress will plateau, and the cost of ICE experimentation will simply outweigh the incremental gains in efficiency and power. The good news? The internal-combustion engine might have one more trick up its cylinder sleeve.
Fuel, air, and spark—the three things an engine needs to run. Air is one ingredient that it makes sense to leave alone. Fuel type is essentially decided by contemporary infrastructure. (Synthetic fuels are in the works, but we’re thinking of large-scale changes in the ICE design that would extend far beyond the top echelons of motorsport to the everyman (and woman) on the street.) That leaves spark as the low-hanging fruit in this equation. If a different type of ignition could more completely burn the fuel and air mixture, it would not only reduce emissions but also increase efficiency.
Enter plasma ignition.
This is what plasma looks like compared to the sharp spark of a traditional ignition system. Transient Plasma Systems, Inc
Traditional spark ignition is very simple. A coil transforms the 12 volts from the car’s charging system into thousands of volts that discharge quickly to jump between the electrode and the ground strap of a spark plug. This forms a sharp but small zap that lights off the chemical chain-reaction that expands the air and fuel mixture to push the piston down and thus rotate the crankshaft. In order for the fuel-and-air mixture to be lit by this type of ignition system, it needs to be fairly close to a stoichiometric mixture; right around 14.7 to 1. That ratio—14.7 grams of air to one gram of fuel—puts a ceiling on efficiency. But here’s where things get interesting.
If we were able to lean out the mixture by adding air but still getting the same in-chamber expansion, and the corresponding force exerted on the piston, efficiency would increase dramatically. A lean mixture is much harder to ignite, though. So hard that you’d need transient plasma to make it happen in any reliable fashion. Technically, the spark on a standard spark plug does create plasma when it ionizes the gasses between the electrode and ground strap; transient plasma takes that small arc and dials it up to 11. If a spark plug is a zap in the chamber, plasma ignition is a TIG welder mounted in a cylinder head.
difference between spark ignition and plasma
Ionfire Ignition
This much more violent mode of ignition can regularly and predictably ignite extremely lean air/fuel mixtures. One of transient plasma’s most obvious advantages, besides a higher-efficiency combustion cycle, is that relatively low amounts of energy are used to perform a lot of electronic “work.” (The difference between energy and power, for those of you who enjoy recalling high school chemistry class.) The spark itself is not lighting a fire to burn the fuel; rather, a rapid-fire sequence of low-range electronic pulses generates a highly potent electric arc, which then breaks the bonds holding the oxygen molecules together and allows the electrons to shoot out, essentially attacking the hydrocarbons (fuel) and creating combustion. This means we are not waiting on a flame to consume the fuel and, in the amount of time between combustion and exhaust strokes, we get a more complete burn.
The most fascinating part? This technology is not new. We traced the basic concept to patents from the 1980s, but technology has obviously come a long way since then. Outfits like Transient Plasma Systems, Inc. and Ionfire Ignition are reviving the concept and the reintroduction is timed quite nicely. (If you’ll forgive the pun.) TPS ignition systems have been tested and show a 20 percent increase in efficiency while also decreasing harmful emissions like NOx by 50 percent. Numbers like that aren’t a silver bullet in the ICE gun, but plasma ignition could keep our beloved internal combustion engines on the road longer than we’d expected. TPS claims it is working with manufacturers to integrate its ignition tech into production engines, but we are still a few years away from seeing the fruit of that collaboration.
The internal-combustion engine has undergone constant evolution for centuries, and at this point we’re extracting incremental gains. Plasma ignition could be one of the last significant improvements to be found in the ICE story. Here’s hoping that this ’80s tech, refined for the 21st century’s needs, makes its way onto the streets.
Could 1980s technology keep internal-combustion engines on the road?
Kyle Smith
20 January 2022
Share
Read enough automotive-related articles on the internet and you will be convinced the internal-combustion engine is being hunted with a fervor typically reserved for villains in Liam Neeson movies. Okay, that conclusion may be extreme—but it holds some truth. Regulations regarding emissions and engine efficiency grow stricter with each passing year and manufacturers are faced with an impossible task: Take a centuries-old design and make it endlessly better—faster, cleaner, stronger, ad infinitum. At some point, progress will plateau, and the cost of ICE experimentation will simply outweigh the incremental gains in efficiency and power. The good news? The internal-combustion engine might have one more trick up its cylinder sleeve.
Fuel, air, and spark—the three things an engine needs to run. Air is one ingredient that it makes sense to leave alone. Fuel type is essentially decided by contemporary infrastructure. (Synthetic fuels are in the works, but we’re thinking of large-scale changes in the ICE design that would extend far beyond the top echelons of motorsport to the everyman (and woman) on the street.) That leaves spark as the low-hanging fruit in this equation. If a different type of ignition could more completely burn the fuel and air mixture, it would not only reduce emissions but also increase efficiency.
Enter plasma ignition.
This is what plasma looks like compared to the sharp spark of a traditional ignition system. Transient Plasma Systems, Inc
Traditional spark ignition is very simple. A coil transforms the 12 volts from the car’s charging system into thousands of volts that discharge quickly to jump between the electrode and the ground strap of a spark plug. This forms a sharp but small zap that lights off the chemical chain-reaction that expands the air and fuel mixture to push the piston down and thus rotate the crankshaft. In order for the fuel-and-air mixture to be lit by this type of ignition system, it needs to be fairly close to a stoichiometric mixture; right around 14.7 to 1. That ratio—14.7 grams of air to one gram of fuel—puts a ceiling on efficiency. But here’s where things get interesting.
If we were able to lean out the mixture by adding air but still getting the same in-chamber expansion, and the corresponding force exerted on the piston, efficiency would increase dramatically. A lean mixture is much harder to ignite, though. So hard that you’d need transient plasma to make it happen in any reliable fashion. Technically, the spark on a standard spark plug does create plasma when it ionizes the gasses between the electrode and ground strap; transient plasma takes that small arc and dials it up to 11. If a spark plug is a zap in the chamber, plasma ignition is a TIG welder mounted in a cylinder head.
difference between spark ignition and plasma
Ionfire Ignition
This much more violent mode of ignition can regularly and predictably ignite extremely lean air/fuel mixtures. One of transient plasma’s most obvious advantages, besides a higher-efficiency combustion cycle, is that relatively low amounts of energy are used to perform a lot of electronic “work.” (The difference between energy and power, for those of you who enjoy recalling high school chemistry class.) The spark itself is not lighting a fire to burn the fuel; rather, a rapid-fire sequence of low-range electronic pulses generates a highly potent electric arc, which then breaks the bonds holding the oxygen molecules together and allows the electrons to shoot out, essentially attacking the hydrocarbons (fuel) and creating combustion. This means we are not waiting on a flame to consume the fuel and, in the amount of time between combustion and exhaust strokes, we get a more complete burn.
The most fascinating part? This technology is not new. We traced the basic concept to patents from the 1980s, but technology has obviously come a long way since then. Outfits like Transient Plasma Systems, Inc. and Ionfire Ignition are reviving the concept and the reintroduction is timed quite nicely. (If you’ll forgive the pun.) TPS ignition systems have been tested and show a 20 percent increase in efficiency while also decreasing harmful emissions like NOx by 50 percent. Numbers like that aren’t a silver bullet in the ICE gun, but plasma ignition could keep our beloved internal combustion engines on the road longer than we’d expected. TPS claims it is working with manufacturers to integrate its ignition tech into production engines, but we are still a few years away from seeing the fruit of that collaboration.
The internal-combustion engine has undergone constant evolution for centuries, and at this point we’re extracting incremental gains. Plasma ignition could be one of the last significant improvements to be found in the ICE story. Here’s hoping that this ’80s tech, refined for the 21st century’s needs, makes its way onto the streets.
The Left will view anything that has to do with gasoline as a threat to their control over others.
If it ain't (psst! hate a cloudy day) solar, (psst! unreliable) wind or burining coal at power plants so electric cars can be plugged in, then it will always be something racist.
The movie series embellished on Atlas Shrugged, suggesting that the Casimir effect was an explanation.
https://byjus.com/physics/casimir-eff...
To make that work, the parallel plates would need to be close on the nanoscale. This reminds me that I need to get ready for my scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) lab tonight!!
Consumer choice. As opposed to the totalitarian-wannabe edicts of the Newsoms and Bidens of "You may not sell gas-powered vehicles after X date." IOW, if you want an electric car, buy and drive an electric car. If you want a gas car, buy and drive a gas car. Simple. If people see electric vehicles - and the power plants that are needed to charge them - as somehow "cleaner," let them be free to make that choice. But take your stinking "green" paws off my car, you damn dirty democrat ape! There is zero justification for removing, at gunpoint, the right of people who favor gas-powered vehicles to buy and drive them.
First of all, human activity has not altered planetary climate, and human activity cannot alter planetary climate. Or more precisely, will only be theoretically capable of altering planetary climate at some point maybe a century or so in our technological future, at which we will have invented and perfected planetary terraforming and we're all waterskiing on Mars and picnicking on Pluto.
∴ any and all government edicts and activist "demonstrations" relating to "stopping climate change" and "saving the planet" must be recognized - and more importantly, exposed - as threadbare political activism, not science. Vestigial, recidivistic Marxist political activism, specifically.
I remember the '60 and '70s, when Los Angeles was nicknamed "smell-A," and "LA Smog" was a virtual redundancy-in-terms. This is of course anecdotal, but I'm coming up on my 22nd year in Los Angeles, and from my arrival on my birthday in the summer of Y2K up through today, I have yet to smell the faintest whiff of smog in LA. It's simply gone. Vamoos.
The point being, we have a massive amount of improvement to pat ourselves on the back over vis-à-vis pollution from cars. Shorn of extraneous political motives (see another post I did about the morph within the Marxist propaganda machine of "Capitalism produces too little" to "Capitalism produces too much,") there is no rational justification for attacking gas-powered cars as a mode of personal transportation. There is no longer any appreciable - i.e., hazardous - degradation of air quality that can be laid on gas-powered transportation. The "perfection" standard that these eco-fascists are demanding is as nebulous and invalid as is any such otherworldly standard, and we can be certain that if they are allowed to force us to all-electric vehicles (with their all-important dependence on the State-controlled power grid to charge them,) once that step is behind them they will blithely declare electric vehicles too, to be a threat to Holy Mother Gaia and something which must be banned too.
We cannot look at this gas-ban offensive without reference to the wider context of the UN's "Agenda 21." The goal is to remove the right to personal migration, via removing the necessary tools for personal migration: personal cars. The goal is to transform the human race into a largish herd of cattle, whose existence and actions occur only under the permission of the State. IOW, neo-Feudalism and neo-serfdom.
A couple of decades ago I watched a debate between Pepperdine University economist George Reisman and a leftwing professor (I think from UC Irvine, where the debate took place,) in which Dr. Reisman identified something I've never heard anyone else even mention, much less champion: The right to internal migration. We have a right to travel. At will, from wherever to wherever we want, whenever we want. We do not have to petition government for permission to move across town or to visit a relative in another province, as with the brutal Chinese Communist Party or in Soviet Soviet Russia or in National Socialist Germany.
When you boil away all of the pious pablum about "saving the planet" and "clean transportation" and, most comically, "zero emissions...ahh, except for yon power plant," it's the ultimate destruction of the right to personal, at-will travel that is the goal of these monsters.
But try to find one, just one, politician who's willing to make this point. The whole lid needs to be ripped off of this charade. The world is drowning in stupidity for the silence of the people who should be doing that emperor-nudity pointing-kid thing.
Personally, l look forward to a time when the attempted confiscation of our right to travel is treated in the same way as horse-theft was treated in the 19th century Old West: As a capital crime.
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Here is the BIG PICTURE Conumdrum...soon the end of this 12 thousand year cycle of civilization will come to a nasty end...precious little will survive, the only electricity to be had will likely be made with oil coal and gas IF, and only if we can safely squirl away the means to procure and produce it and likely, the only way to do that will be with...gas, oil, deseil or natural gas vehicles; in short, the internal combustion engine....unless ye shall wield pick, shovel and peddle powered wheels and gears made out of who knows what ever is left to use from a desolated landscape.
in testing at home, with deep cycle lead acid batteries i get about 50% back of what it took to charge them
Electric vehicles are about twice as fuel efficient as ICE cars.
I am not a climate alarmist, but we need correct arguments, not technical fiction.
My freedom is not part of any compromise.
I can't trust the state. It is far too powerful and corrupt.
So, if the state wants me to favor electric vehicles, I am immediately suspicious.
Let the Germans and Aussies wreck their energy delivery system, since they trust their corrupt governments.
Give me liberty and give the corrupeteers death.
There is a significant difference between the two kinds of cars beyond their power method: Dependence. A gas-powered vehicle can be fueled at any independent gas vendor, which vendor in turn is supplied by a wide array of petroleum companies, all of the private firms, not government agencies. Or even from one's own bulk fuel tank, if you have one.
An electric car has to be charged, with said charge dependent on whatever local power grid is available. Unless I'm way, way behind the curve, every power company in the country is either a government-run entity or a government-controlled local monopoly.
Force people to give up gas-powered cars for electric cars, and you have forced people to depend on a government-controlled entity for their personal transportation. I think that's the overarching goal of this, not "stopping climate change" or "stopping plate tectonics" or whatever windmills these charlatans are tilting at at the moment.
Yes, arguably a gas-powered car is as dependent on a supplier as an electric car, but barring the sudden emergence of as vast an array of private power companies (which would run up against the same "redundant infrastructure" argument that's used to justify cable monopolies and government-"owned" roadways,) a shift to electric vehicles inescapably means a shift to de facto dependence on government for transportation.
Any resident of Los Angeles can tell you about the perennial exhortations from the State power monopoly to "conserve usage between x hour and x hour today." That's now. Extrapolate to a future in which the vast majority of people are having to plug their cars in for a charge, tapping into that same power grid that's already straining. IOW, a shift from gas power to electric power means an open door to government rationing - read: control - of our right to travel at will. All of it indirectly of course. The better to conceal the iron fist of force.
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One of my favorite sites has a lot of commentary on this:
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/categ...
I have a video of me snow blowing after soccer, wearing shorts and crocs!
You can always put on more clothes, but you can only take off so many before people start complaining!
That droning sound put me to sleep every summer night.
Our school (in a SE small town) had no a/c either, Thor, but the coal furnace worked well in winter.
I can take a lot of heat (if I have adequate water and a shady spot) but you can have my share of the winter, guys.
Notice all the ryming? LMAO
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a
young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and
wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it
will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout"
o/O
But using less fuel to do all these things is a Good Thing!
All these fuel efficiency robbing emissions measures they’ve put on engines have actually made the problem worse. My father, who was an automotive engineer (you use one of his patented ideas everytime you shift out of park) was convinced the EPA was actually trying to cut fuel efficiency in vehicles in the 1990s because cars had gotten pretty darn efficient. Why....BIG OIL. Why not?
And in the end it has nothing to do with oil. It’s about control. The Rockefeller’s have divested themselves of fossil fuels not because of some moralistic crusade. But to move on and monopolize the next thing that will make them rich at the expense of others. Crony Capitalism is forever.
I'm not buying this story. You want a slower burning fuel-air mixture to increase power, and enable higher compression ratios, which are fundamental to efficiency. Higher octane gas is specifically slower burning.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/g...
You all know I'm not a climate alarmist or a misled CO2 Nazi, but we need to be technically correct in our arguments.
Separately, I love ICE cars. I've rebuilt dozens of engines, and became a mechanical engineer partly because of this. Connecting shade-tree knowledge to physics was one of the highlights of my educational process.
If we have to support a farm subsidy (for stupid political reasons), use the corn oil for diesel. This works effectively and efficiently.
No more cars with lug bolts for me though. The rest will have studs and lug nuts. Getting my Lotus 7 back on the road in the spring! Needed a new computer (totally new aftermarket). It has a 2.0 Zetec with supercharger and weighs 1,110 lbs.
a plasma spark plug ?
I went to an alternative energy show a number of years ago where there was one young fellow who had a hydrogen-powered Toyota pickup truck. He did his own conversion and had two fiberglass tanks in the bed of the truck for hydrogen storage which got filled every two weeks at the Palo-Verde Nuclear Power plant that has a hydrogen depot. If those idiots in Washington DC can get their marshmallow brains working, there are other viable technologies that can work in existing ICE vehicles.