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 by Sparky
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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.

Tags: Engine, Fuel by Sparky
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jstadwater from energetic forum has built a v8 circuit based on gmeast’s 4 cylinder circuit. He is planning to mount it in his Chevy 350 and/or GTA Tranz-Am. It’s a plasma spark using V-8 HEI distributor and capacitor with blocking diodes.

Tags: Circuits, Engine by Sparky
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Gmeast has released a new video with all four spark plugs hooked up and ready for installation to the engine of his VW (not the one in the video btw). Pretty impressive and clean setup.

Tags: Circuits, Components, Engine by Sparky
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This is Revizals latest video showing the effect of the plasma spark in action while running his motorbike engine. He has hooked up a secondary plug out side the engine to show the effect that is happening inside. What is most interesting is he notices his exhaust is clear when the plasma spark is in action.

Tags: Engine by Sparky
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Aaron has been making good progress and appears to have confirmed that the event is a plasma discharged which is increased by adding water to the mix. Some people feel it is more of a magnetic and electric event than actually exploding HHO while others think it definitely has a hydrogen combustion element to the event due the the luminousity of the light that is emitted.

Here’s some more interesting analysis from smw1998a…

Looking deeper, with the scope, I set about measuring the discharge time of the capacitor. Without the HV diode, observing the standard high tension spark, the duration of the discharge from 250v was 140uS (micro seconds). This is pretty quick considering the secondary winding of the ignition coil has around 7 to 8k ohm of resistance.

The reason for the “effect” became obvious when I connected the HV diode and ran the test again. The scope showed the capacitor discharge from 250v took only 8uS resulting in the enhanced spark. As the voltage output of a transformer is proportional to the rate of change, clearly, the significantly shorter discharge is producing more voltage in a shorter time, resulting in the amplification of the spark discharge for the same energy input.

My conclusion at this time is; At the moment of switch closure, the HV diode conducts and allows the secondary winding to potentialise and the magnetic domains in the coil core to begin to orientate themselves, thus reducing the resistance presented in the secondary winding and magnetically in the coil core at the very beginning of induction. As the capacitor discharges through the primary winding, the induced voltage in the secondary increases rapidly. Once the voltage of the secondary winding exceeds the voltage held in the capacitor the diode becomes reverse biased and blocks the rapidly rising voltage. As most of the resistance, both electrical and magnetic have been significantly reduced very early in the coil discharge, the remaining energy discharges very rapidly creating the “effect”.

IMO The effect is a unidirectional, short duration, high voltage pulse. The exact criteria for Peter’s “Electro Radiant Event”.

Tags: Circuits, e=mc2 by Sparky
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This is a research paper explaining and evaluating the processes involved in the creation of the plasma arc.

Water Spark Plug Research

Also check out the webpage devoted to water fuel technology…

Plasma Electrolysis

Tags: Circuits, e=mc2 by Sparky
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The late Stanley Meyer is a cult hero. He championed the idea of a water powered car in the US in the 80′s and early 90′s. He faced a court battle from his business partners where he eventually went on record as saying he didn’t have the technology he claimed he did and had to pay them back the $25,000 they had invested in him. He died under suspicious circumstances that led many to believe he had been taken out by any one of the powerful organizations with vested interests in stopping water from becoming a fuel resource.

Interestingly, in the past two years his patents became available for public consumption and now we suddenly see the explosion of people all over the world picking up from where he left but with the exception that this time it is being done in open forums with no patents and no secrets. How do you stop a flood when the dams already been breached?

Maybe it is time that Meyer is recognized for the truly gifted inventor that it now appears he really was.

Here’s a couple of vids that explain a little about the man.

Tags: Chronology, Circuits, Engine, Fuel by Sparky
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