What ever happened to the Arvin Meritor Plasma Fuel reformer? It was billed as the revolution to help meet 2010 emission standards. Now it seem to be almost completely shelved if you look around the internet.

Press Release 2004

This product has all the promise of the plasma spark plug but with the backing of a large well respected automotive parts manufacturer and MIT science too boot.

Initial development of a Plasma Fuel Reformer required as much as 2,000 watts of electrical energy to operate. A measure of the progress is that today’s unit uses an average of less than 100 watts. Full production systems are likely to be even lower. Early systems took many seconds to produce hydrogen from cold exhaust, an important disadvantage in real-world use, as emissions are highest at this time. The latest versions are running in less than a second. And the first prototypes only produced hydrogen at just one flow rate. Today’s prototypes manage transient or varying flow demands equally well.

Almost the same principal as the plasma spark plug concept really. Strange that this hasn’t made it to market yet. You would think people would be very interested in having it on board to cut emissions and save on consumption.

The Plasma Fuel Reformer stems from work done by and licensed from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center . Seven years in development, the Plasma Fuel Reformer — or Plasmatron as MIT called it — could have an enormous impact on emissions and fuel efficiency. From MIT in 2003:

The team is finding that the device could make vehicles cleaner and more efficient, with a potentially significant impact on oil consumption.

“If widespread use of plasmatron hydrogen-enhanced gasoline engines could eventually increase the average efficiency of cars and other light-duty vehicles by 20 percent, the amount of gasoline that could be saved would be around 25 billion gallons a year,” [Daniel] Cohn [one of the leaders of the team and head of the Plasma Technology Division at MIT’s PSFC] said. “That corresponds to around 70 percent of the oil that is currently imported by the United States from the Middle East.”

The Bush administration has made development of a hydrogen-powered vehicle a priority, [John] Heywood [John Heywood, director of MIT’s Sloan Automotive Lab] noted. “That’s an important goal, as it could lead to more efficient, cleaner vehicles, but is it the only way to get there? Engines using plasmatron reformer technology could have a comparable impact, but in a much shorter time frame,” he said.

The work was funded by the Department of Energy’s FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Program and by ArvinMeritor.

MIT PRESS RELEASE – from 2003!!!

The researchers and colleagues from industry report that the plasmatron, used with an exhaust treatment catalyst on a diesel engine bus, removed up to 90 percent of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the bus’s emissions. Nitrogen oxides are the primary components of smog.

The plasmatron reformer also cut in half the amount of fuel needed for the removal process. “The absorption catalyst approach under consideration for diesel exhaust NOx removal requires additional fuel to work,” explained Daniel R. Cohn, one of the leaders of the team and head of the Plasma Technology Division at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). “The plasmatron reformer reduced that amount of fuel by a factor of two compared to a system without the plasmatron.”

Tags: Components, e=mc2, Engine, Fuel // 2 Comments »