Water Sparkplug

[Aaron]

lean burn

Aaron, It ran like a champ when you opened the throttle. Very lean add more air...stronger?

T

T, with this ignition, and we still only used small capacitance and voltage, it ran much stronger being as lean as we could get it and with the throttle open. With the magneto, it did not run that strong even with the gas setting roughly halfway between lean and rich. Also, with the magneto, it was not as smooth.

[tstorey]

Greg,

Looks great.

Thanks for the vid.

It is heartenting to see that this is being so well replicated!

All of you, this is an extraordinary achievement.

Keep these great results and findings coming!

T

[tstorey]

Rick,

Thank you for Plasma video.

Very helpful!

T

[Jetijs]

Hi,
I did a research on reed switches and found out that a typical reed switch has a dielectric strength between contacts of about 300V. This is why my reed does self trigger at voltages higher than 300V. There are reed switches that with a dielectric strength between contacts of 500v or even 1000V. So I will have to find one of those
Thanks!

[Kinetix]

Aaron, thank you for payng attention to my post.
I used twoo capacitors for this reason: the first is to fire to the ignition coil, and the second to fire through the diodes string, directly on the spark plug. This separation is done by the D5.
I understood that both the HV and the LV must be oriented in the same direction, so I put the + of the diodes string and the HV on the spark plug. What's wrong? I don't understand...
I use 15 diodes, each having a 500k resistor in paralel, so there is a 7.5MOhm resistor. It seems that, when HV and LV connected, the electricity chooses the easy path, and that is the 7.5MOhm resistor, instead of the air spark gap. I use a test device that has two electrodes and a measured air gap between them that I set to variable distances, up to 10mm for test with plasma.
What should I do? Should I remove the resistors?
Does anyone use paralel resistors with the diode string?
I work on this project for a month now, and it begins to make me tired. All that I could make is a very good and reliable CDI, ready to be mounted on my car for tests, but no useful plasma...
Thank you very much for help!

[Jetijs]

Kinetix,
You should indeed try to remove the resistors. None of us use them.

[gmeast]

Thanx for your comments!

Greg,

Looks great.

Thanks for the vid.

It is heartenting to see that this is being so well replicated!

All of you, this is an extraordinary achievement.

Keep these great results and findings coming!

T

Yes, more must build this!

[gmeast]

Thank you so much!

Greg,

Excellent work. Your vid shows all the fundamental behaviors of the system. You are well on your way to studying this extraordinary phenomena! The lack of heat in the spark really is amazing. I am really happy you were able to adapt what you had to what we showed and get a fully operating unit.

Keep up the great work.

Peter

I appreciate your comments and it was fun and quick to build. More should build this. It's too bad you couldn't easily see the wimpy "stock" spark in my vid.

I have been using a generator set for all of my research including a modified thermodynamic cycle (mainstream engineering), but I also proved the merits of hydroxy gas on it. I will use this genset and trigger off of a combination of the stock magneto pulse and sine wave edge. This may be a problem if I need to advance the timing though. I plan to use the AC electrical output of the genset to power the circuitry at steady state in order to monitor overhead.

First I'll get the genset running on the plug with gas and then start fiddling with fuels (water emulsions).

Thanks again for your comments.

[tstorey]

All, please consider

Steam............I don't think a great deal of pressure is necessary, I just thought it would be interesting to see. Spraying water at the plug has yielded enhancement. Steam would act differently than a "spray."

As the effect is not "bringing" heat steam subjected to the spark might yield a conclusion or two.

One of the youtube guys (Aussie?) does something similar, but it's an odd hookup. It was a blast of pressurized steam and he used a different circuit.

Thanks for your thoughts!

T

[Jetijs]

Hi all
Today I tried out this circuit on my generator engine:



It did work, but not as good as I hoped. The RPM's were about 2000-2500 and they were not constant. The engine choked a lot as if there were many missed sparks. I think that this is because of the solid state relay as it can not handle high frequencies. Then I attached the stock ignition again and everything run just fine and smooth. I found some reed relays on a local store web page, will buy these tomorrow. The datasheet of these reed relays says that the reed switch contacts of these relays can handle up to 500V, they should work fine.

[Aaron]

Kinetix corrected schematic

Kinetix,

This should work. You have the hv discharge connected directly to the annode of the hv diode string and the + of the c2. You want them in relationship to each other like I show here...also with resistor removed.
The hv output of coil should only be in contact with the cathode of the hv diode string.

Your C2 is small capacitance, but you should still get the effect with it. Your size of C2 is also consistent with C1, which is what some patents show.

Please try and let us know what happens.

[lighty]

@Aaron

D2,D3,D4,R2,R3 are unnecessary. Replace them with a single transil protection diode of appropriate voltage.

[Jetijs]

Hi all.
A youtuber Ansis99 suggested that we could also use HV capacitors instead of the HV diodes. So I tried it out and it actually works. I used two 0.001uF 4kV caps in series. The spark is somewhat less loud than when using diodes, but when water is sprayed on the contacts, the spark still becomes louder indicating that it has water igniting capability. Accidentally I observed another interesting thing, after the cap test I disconnected the caps so that one end of the cap was still connected to the low voltage + side and other side was about 10mm away from the HV side. I just wanted to see an ordinary spark to compare loudness. But when I triggered the relay, there was two sparks, one on the spark gap, and another, much bigger and louder on the 10mm gap between HV side and cap unconnected terminal. This does not happen when using diodes. I made a small video about this:

YouTube - Water spatk circuit using HV caps instead of the diodes

[insane4evr]

SCR false triggering

Hi all,

I just found this thread and I am reading with great interest.

On most circuits posted, I see an SCR being used. The common way to trigger an SCR to conduction is by applying a voltage to the gate that is positive with respect to the cathode. Circuits posted are doing this by connecting the gate to the anode via relay contact. Gate Voltage level to trigger usually is 1.5 volts typical. Gate trigger current is typically 15 mA for regular SCRs and 30 - 200 microamps for the sensitive gate SCRs. These parameters are temperature dependent.

Another way of triggering an SCR to conduction is exceeding its critical rate of applied forward voltage (dV/dT). A fast rising voltage applied to the anode will be coupled to the gate via distributed internal capacitance in the SCR silicon turning on the SCR.

External circuits connecting the anode to the gate even though still open (reed relay contact, SSR contact, opto transistors, etc) will increase this anode to gate capacitance and will make the SCR more susceptible to false triggering. Resistive leakage and noise on the external gate wiring will agravate the condition.

A solution to false triggering is to add a resistor between the SCR gate and cathode. This desensitizes the gate from leakage and external noise pickup. Anode dV/dT triggering can be minimized by adding a capacitor between SCR gate and cathode. It also desensitizes the gate from noise pickup. In one of my application, I used 1K and .01 uF, you can go lower on the resistor and higher on the capacitor. Some also connect a capacitor between anode and cathode to prevent dV/dT triggering.

Just my 2 cents.

[Peter Lindemann]

Secondary Spark

Hi all.
A youtuber Ansis99 suggested that we could also use HV capacitors instead of the HV diodes. So I tried it out and it actually works. I used two 0.001uF 4kV caps in series. The spark is somewhat less loud than when using diodes, but when water is sprayed on the contacts, the spark still becomes louder indicating that it has water igniting capability. Accidentally I observed another interesting thing, after the cap test I disconnected the caps so that one end of the cap was still connected to the low voltage + side and other side was about 10mm away from the HV side. I just wanted to see an ordinary spark to compare loudness. But when I triggered the relay, there was two sparks, one on the spark gap, and another, much bigger and louder on the 10mm gap between HV side and cap unconnected terminal. This does not happen when using diodes. I made a small video about this:

YouTube - Water spatk circuit using HV caps instead of the diodes

Jetijs,

This is great! I must admit, however, that Aaron and I have seen this secondary spark with the diode systems, as well. Whatever the effect is, it definitely LIKES the secondary path! But replacing the HV diodde with an HV cap is another excellent discovery. We should start experimenting with larger and smaller caps to see how this effects the process.

One possibility is that your capacitors are still "too large" and that by making it even smaller (less capacitance) the time constant of the cap charging will shrink even further and approach the switching speed of the diode. That is, if the cap is actually doing what the diode is doing. The other possibility is that the cap is too small, and that it charges up first, before the spark occurs, and then discharges across the gap in an accentuated spark. In this case, there will be an optimum size in relation to the coil output.

Actually, Aaron has showed me a number of patents that simply put a small capacitor right across the spark gap that produce an accentuated spark. This may be what we are seeing here, even though the primary of the ignition coil is still involved.

If we can figure this out, HV caps are definitely cheaper than HV diodes!

Try moving the HV cap to right across the spark gap and see what happens then.

Great post!

Peter