A couple of people are now working with water vaporizers in addition to the plasma spark and gasoline mix. the initial results are very encouraging with gmeast and his vexus circuit getting 13% improvement on factory mileage specs and 43% improvement on previous best results without the plasma circuit installed.

Another interesting development is the across the board switch to Champion L76V plugs non-resistor type marine spark plugs due to them having a non bridged tip which lets the spark radiate in 360 degree angle around the tip and causes less overall wear as well as greater efficiency.

Here’s a nice simple overview for the plasma spark circuit from smw1998a. As another person has said it’s simply electrolysis inside the engine. In other words just directly splitting water/gas to get access to the hydrogen for added boost.

Vexus and the original circuit both disruptively discharge capacitors across an arc created by a HT coil. The only difference is Vexus uses a storage capacitor specific to this purpose where the original circuit used the capacitor that also provided the energy source for the primary winding of the ignition coil.

There was a post aimed at me about spark duration. (I have been inactive for several months) The spark duration of an inductive ignition coil is around 120uS to 140uS (micro seconds). This is true whether you inductively charge the coil as designed with points and condenser or in my circuit dumping 300v across the primary from a 4uf capacitor (without the HV diode). I’m not sure, but I think modern CDI is around 60uS because the coils are constructed differently.

Anyway, the addition of the HV diode in my circuit reduced the spark duration from 140uS to 10uS. Not because of the plasma in the discharge, but because the energy stored in the capacitor discharging across the primary winding went short circuit via the HV diode the instant the arc formed. Thus, creating the plasma effect and instantly robbing the primary winding of all power and terminating the arc.

IMHO this was the advantage of the original circuit. The abrupt end to the arc allowing me to produce the effect with very little stored power. The problem with increasing the stored energy or capacitance was that only so much of it shorted across the arc. If the duration of the arc ends before the energy in the capacitor is spent, you get a curve at the bottom of the vertical discharge trace at around 50v. This is the remaining, stored energy bleeding off via the resistance of the primary winding. I considered this wasted energy. If you have energy on your capacitor after the disruptive discharge, it is wasted (this may not apply to the Vexus circuit).

It is the stored energy of the capacitor shorted across the arc that produces the effect. The more energy you can dump across that arc the more violent the effect. For bench purposes the lower the capacitance and the higher the voltage, the higher the frequency and the shorter the spark time. It all leads to some interesting effects. But this is not what is required for the ICE.

The advantages of the Vexus circuit are clear. It offers an almost bolt on or piggy back approach to implementing the circuit in a vehicle. This can only be a good thing but there are drawbacks. The spark duration will be that of the normal ignition system. It may SEEM to require greater capacitance to produce the effect but the more energy you dump across the arc the greater the wear on the plugs and distributor (unless you dump directly across the plugs). As the spark duration could be up to 14 times greater than the original circuit, Increasing the capacitance even further could be possible at the risk of very rapid plug wear.
There is a conundrum here. A greater effect can be produced with less power using the original single, low value capacitor circuit. Less energy will be required from the charge pump, higher frequencies and less wear at the plugs. Difficult to implement or piggy back onto a standard ignition system.

The Vexus circuit is easier implement but larger capacitance and longer spark duration create more wear on the plugs and require beefy charge pumps. There will have to be a trade off with the Vexus circuit between a powerful effect and plug wear. Capacitance need only be great enough to prove beneficial to fuel consumption and running. Too much capacitance and circuit supply, reliability and plug wear will reduce the gains of the system.

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