Water Sparkplug

[Jetijs]

Hey everyone. Just had a whole lot of fun. I attached the selfmade ignition system to the generator. The gas tank was not attached yet, but I tried to start the engine. And I was very surprised that it started to run But then I realized that there was some gas left in the carby. Also the diodes were not switched on. The timing was around 10-20 degree before TDC. I did not bother to adjust everything right for now, I just wanted to see if it would run. So I attached the gas tank and started the engine. It run fine. There was a little bit of choking but it ran. Then I stopped the engine and turned the diodes ON. As soon as I started the engine again, there was a very loud BOOM somewhere in the engine at the first spark and after that it ran fine. But I was scared so I stopped the engine. Will experiment some more tomorrow with a guy who understands much more about engines than I do. That is it for today, I got my dose of adrenaline
Thanks,
Jetijs

[Jetijs]

Is there any shaft visible between motor and generator? Any space to put some optical switch?

The generator shaft was press fitted on the motor shaft which was cone shaped. At the moment, the generator shaft/rotor is not attached to the motor shaft. It would not be easy to attach some kind of timing wheel on that cone shaped motor shaft end. Will have to think about something else

Aaron, can you post a circuit diagram of how you attached the 555 timer to the SCR circuit for the 50Hz test? My solid state relay can not switch at that rate and I would like to test the max frequency
Thanks,
Jetijs.

[gmeast]

Replication

Hi forum,

I uploaded a video of my recent water sparkplug adventure. Thanks to Peter Lindmann, Aaron and Gotoluc for inspiration.

The circuit is basically the full isolation circuit in Peter's Lindemann's video. The only differences are: 1) I used line AC direct with no variac and 2) I used a commercial flasher module so I didn't need to build the 555 circuitry.

The relay coil is 120VAC for the latter. The cap is 100uf-400VDC. The diode is HV microwave replacement diode 15Kv - 200 amp surge. The plug is a non-resistor plug for a Briggs and Stratton overhead valve engine.

As is known, it is hard to appreciate the flames coming off of the plug. No heat appears to be generated at the plug and in fact it is cold. The only heat is at the limiting resistor on the bridge and the cap is only slightly warm (very slightly). The flash is pure white and intense when squirt with water. The electrode on the plug look as new after about six hours of running..

The video is at the following link:
YouTube - Water Sparkplug Replication

Peace to all,

Greg

[Kinetix]

Hello, everybody.
I have read alot of your posts, but not all. You know, I am a Romanian and not so good at English.
Anyway. I built a circuit that is basically a CDI ignition, but I added a second capacitor and a chain of diodes to discharge directly on the spark plug, along with the high voltage spark.

It does not work properly...
With the classic CDI schematic (without the chain of the diodes 1N4007 and parallel resistors connected), I have nice 20mm white sparks (no plasma), good to run on any gasoline car. But when connect the second capacitor (both charged at 320-380V), the high voltage spark disappears, and got nothing instead. No plasma... I must add that in the circuit I use, the oscilator it's being stopped by a Schmitt trigger while the capacitors fires, to protect it.
Although, if the spark gap is very short (1-2, maybe 3mm), plasma occurs.
But that is not enough, cause in the engine, the voltage required is much higher, so I have to obtain plasma sparks at least 10-15mm long to work well.
I saw others have had this problem, but with other schematics...
How can I improve mine?
I have tryed to reverse the polarity of the coil, but same result.
Is the capacitor too small?
Thanks.

[Monkeyron]

Timing

With your adjustable Timing of this Circuit, Retard it to 5 to 10 before and see how that works for you.
Next Remove the Gasoline, add cold fog mixed with some HHO, then retard it to 25 After.
Let explode Water Shall we!
Ron

[Peter Lindemann]

Great Replication!

Hi forum,

I uploaded a video of my recent water sparkplug adventure. Thanks to Peter Lindmann, Aaron and Gotoluc for inspiration.

The circuit is basically the full isolation circuit in Peter's Lindemann's video. The only differences are: 1) I used line AC direct with no variac and 2) I used a commercial flasher module so I didn't need to build the 555 circuitry.

The relay coil is 120VAC for the latter. The cap is 100uf-400VDC. The diode is HV microwave replacement diode 15Kv - 200 amp surge. The plug is a non-resistor plug for a Briggs and Stratton overhead valve engine.

As is known, it is hard to appreciate the flames coming off of the plug. No heat appears to be generated at the plug and in fact it is cold. The only heat is at the limiting resistor on the bridge and the cap is only slightly warm (very slightly). The flash is pure white and intense when squirt with water. The electrode on the plug look as new after about six hours of running..

The video is at the following link:
YouTube - Water Sparkplug Replication

Peace to all,

Greg

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

[Peter Lindemann]

High Speed Circuit

The generator shaft was press fitted on the motor shaft which was cone shaped. At the moment, the generator shaft/rotor is not attached to the motor shaft. It would not be easy to attach some kind of timing wheel on that cone shaped motor shaft end. Will have to think about something else

Aaron, can you post a circuit diagram of how you attached the 555 timer to the SCR circuit for the 50Hz test? My solid state relay can not switch at that rate and I would like to test the max frequency
Thanks,
Jetijs.

Jetijs,

I'll answer this, since I developed the circuit that did this. Right now, the circuit diagram is over at my shop and I am at home, where my computer is. In general, the circuit was a 555 timer set up for a variable frequency output with a 2% duty cycle. That 555 output was used to drive a 2N4401 (small signal NPN) that was used to switch the coil of a small reed relay. The reed relay was then used to trigger the SCR (connect the gate to the anode) through a 3k resistor. These components were chosen for a number of reasons. First, it allowed isolation between the low voltage control system and the high voltage capacitor/SCR system. Second, in the next phase of development, we could simply move the reed relay over to the engine and have the magnet on the flywheel trigger it. It worked perfectly in both situations, and was perfectly adequate for initial testing.

The 23.5uf capacitor is charged through a FWB and a 50 ohm, 40 watt resistor, which you can see Aaron testing the temperature of in the latest vid. This runs just fine, as long as we power it from a 12 volt inverter that produces a "modified sine" signal. When run from the power line directly, we had to go with half-wave rectification, so there were dead spaces in the charging signal for the SCR to re-set.

If you need the complete schematic, I can get that for you in the next day or so.

Peter

[gotoluc]

@everyone,

Sorry to say but the light ball Anomaly that I found ended up being an artifact made by the video camera I used.

I removed the 2 Youtube videos relating to the study of the effect and I also edited out information referring to this effect in my postst since I do not want future readers to read information just to find in the end that it's not correct.

Sorry for the camera glitch.

Luc

[Aaron]

cap and diode mislocation?

Kinetix,

It looks like c2 and d6 are in the wrong location. Those string of didoes are pointing in the wrong direction.

Can anyone edit that diagram nicely? My freehand digital sketches are less than fine

[Jetijs]

Thanks Peter
I understood everything, there is no need for a circuit anymore It is just that in my case I can not use a reed relay because at 300v it would trigger randomly just as my ordinary reed switch did. In this case I would need to use a variac, half wave rectifier and lower voltages. Maybe you can suggest some other way how I can use the reed switch at 300V? This is the circuit I am using now:

The solid state relay that I have, has trouble to work properly at higher frequencies than 40Hz and that is on atmospheric pressure, I don't know what happens in the combustion chamber

[Aaron]

reed triggering unlimited on backside

Jetijs,

For doing any of this in any serious way on an engine, I think keeping the front cap dumps smaller like a regular cdi on the front side is the best method. Then put all the capacitance on the backside as much booster as you want. Then the reed will effectively be indirectly switching unlimited voltages/capacitances.

[Peter Lindemann]

40 Hz

Thanks Peter
I understood everything, there is no need for a circuit anymore It is just that in my case I can not use a reed relay because at 300v it would trigger randomly just as my ordinary reed switch did. In this case I would need to use a variac, half wave rectifier and lower voltages. Maybe you can suggest some other way how I can use the reed switch at 300V? This is the circuit I am using now:

The solid state relay that I have, has trouble to work properly at higher frequencies than 40Hz and that is on atmospheric pressure, I don't know what happens in the combustion chamber

Jetijs,

Perhaps the problem is NOT the SSR. If you are half-wave rectifying your inverter output, you are only charging your cap at 50 HZ. You could not expect to be able to discharge it reliably at speeds closely approaching the charge rate. If you are charging the cap through a modified sine inverter, then switch to a FWB on the charge side and see if your stable discharge rate can rise as well.

Peter

[Jetijs]

Peter,
I am sorry, the circuit I posted is not correct . I am already using a full wave bridge rectifier. My inverter output is a modified sine wave so I can use a full wave rectification with no problems. I also tried this solid state relay on Imhotep's oscillator and I could not get higher than those 40 Hz and the light was flickering.

[rickoff]

High speed camera showing plasma effect

Hi folks,

The following video link is from an experiment done at Berlin Humbolt University's Berlin Institute for Plasmaphysics by Dr. Gerd Fussmann. The video was shot in the lab using a high speed video camera.

Video - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Nachrichten


Best to all,

Rick

[peteroks]

Hi this is first post here but I hope it is a good one ---Regarding getting control over ignition systems .see Ignition system for small engines running on Hydroxy ONLY
could this help