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Laser Ignition May Replace the Spark Plug
dusty writes "Laser Focus World has a story on researchers from Ford, GSI, and The University of Liverpool and their success in using near-infrared lasers instead of spark plugs in automobile engines. The laser pulses are delivered to the combustion chamber one of two ways. One, the laser energy is transmitted through free space and into an optical plug. Two, the other more challenging method uses fiber optics. Attempts so far to put the second method into play have met some challenges. The researchers are confident that the fiber-optic laser cables' technical challenges (such as a 20% parasitic loss, and vibration issues) will soon be overcome. Both delivery schemes drastically reduce harmful emissions and increase performance over the use of spark plugs. So the spark plug could soon join the fax machine in the pantheon of antiquated technologies that will never completely disappear. The news release from The University of Liverpool has pictures of the freakin' internal combustion lasers."
If it makes cool red lights flash under the hood like KITT, I'm all for it.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
When the vehicle gets to be a few years old, and the rings start letting extra oil past. Soon the lenses are covered with soot. Sparks can still jump through a moderate layer of soot, can the laser?
This will probably arrive as a viable and reliable technology right about the same time the internal combustion engine is on it's way out.
Don't think fax machine, think FD Trinitron.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Is it one shark per cylinder?
Yeah, they're gonna be pissed.
Of the freakin sharks in the freakin engine bay!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I'd go trade mark that name quick if I were you... "SharkPlugs"
this is typical insane engineering- if this succeeds then a mechanic would need to be an expert in light theory and frickin laser beams to work on your car.
Only as much as they need to be an expert in fluid dynamics to change your oil.
this is not the way to make cars more efficient- spark plugs work great and im sure these lasers cant give any more power - the spark plug ignites the gas already, and it BURNS- how much more combustion could you get?
It is a good question as to how this would work any better but if you've ever spent any time under the hood you know it doesn't take much in the way of fouling or plug wire degradation to change fuel efficiency. If this system can avoid those kinds of issues it would make certain aspects of tune ups obsolete and would also increase fuel efficiency over a period when traditional plugs and wires would degrade but not to the point of seemingly needing replaced.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
the spark plug ignites the gas already, and it BURNS- how much more combustion could you get?
It's not so much getting more combustion, but making the combustion behave how we want it to. And there's a long way that can be gone.
But whether this has any real point compared to other fuels, such as diesel that have a big leg up on gasoline to start with, is up for debate.
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I'm assuming it's because gasoline is a helluva lot easier to light on fire. My experience from being an adolescent firebug was that gas burns easily, but very quickly, whereas diesel takes a lot more heat to get started, but burns more slowly, and probably releases more energy. I'm no chemist, but my understanding is that different hydrocarbons have different energy yields, and diesel is much more efficient, the tradeoff being a very different kind of engine.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Duh. The nozzles at the gas station are different sizes.
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inefficient. Adding a laser is not going to do much.
Gasoline will auto-ignite just fine, it's just much trickier to control when it ignites than with spark ignition or diesel ignition.
Mercades has a engine in development called the diesotto that does this.
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Great, the laser pulses will probably be DRM encoded so that only authorized chips are used and vendors that insert the appropriate smart card can perform service on them...
The advent of CPU-enhanced cars is a great one, but this is one place where the govt really needs to step in an open things up. For standard engine codes, things aren't too bad; but Lord help you if you want to read an ABS or airbag code from a GM vehicle (for example). They're locked down. I have some decent PC-based code reader hardware and software, but in order to read the ABS error that my two vehicles are both showing (GM, learn to design ABS, will ya!), I need to spend hundreds or thousands on their own software/hardware to simply find out which of my four ABS sensors is faulty.
The more they get into specialized things like this, including laser ignition, the more I worry that I won't be able to be a backyard mechanic any more.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Gasoline is a very 'dry' fluid. It provides almost no lubricity. Diesel engines need some lubricity in their fuel to lubricate the very high pressure injection system (might be less of an issue with modern common rail systems and piezo injectors though).
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"So the spark plug could soon join the fax machine in the pantheon of antiquated technologies that will never completely disappear."
:(
I always get my secretary to page me when I get a new fax. Then I head over to the closest payphone and give her a call to see what it says. Generally its just spam
I've spent entirely too much time under the hood of a car(21 year auto mechanic), and you are entirely incorrect.
Degrading plug wires either cause a misfire, which is blindingly obvious and kills mileage horribly, or doesn't. There is no middle ground. Plug wire misfires happen maybe once or twice in the 300,000 mile life of a (japanese...) car.
Modern electronic ignition systems are fairly immune to spark plug wear until extreme circumstances, such as missing three tuneups in a row with standard plugs. Then you will sometimes get drivibility issues and lose 1mpg, tops.
Back in the days of points it was different, plug wear and point wear (mostly point wear) had huge effects on mileage between tuneups. These days, the effects are minimal at most.
Those aren't spark plugs, they're glow plugs. different animal altogether. No spark, just a hot wire...
this is typical insane engineering- if this succeeds then a mechanic would need to be an expert in light theory and frickin laser beams to work on your car.
No, you do exactly what they do now:
When it is determined that there is no spark = replace the coil pack (laser sequencer), or replace the plug wires (fiber pipes), or replace the spark plugs (thingies that screw into the cylinders).
Now...this laser stuff may or may not be needed. But repairs nowadays = remove and replace the bogus part.
The coil pack on my almost 10 year old truck is a sealed unit. No fix, just replace.
Plug wires? Trivially replaced
Plugs? The only thing I might need to do is wirebrush. Or replace at $1.50 ea.
A laser ignition might be useful in adjusting the ignition rate and level, according to engine load, and balanced with fuel flow/mixture. Similar to a camera flash. Depending on need, you might want it to fire slower or later than under full load.
With a current spark plug, you get to time it, but not adjust the level of spark. You get spark or no spark.
There's another obvious application for this - detonating nuclear bombs.
Nuclear weapons require that all the charges be detonated simultaneously, within nanoseconds, so that the implosion squeeze is precisely symmetrical. (OK, A-bomb geeks, I'm ignoring asymmetrical designs and flying-plate systems here.) If the timing is even a few nanoseconds off, the core won't be compressed; it will just blow out on one side, and a "fizzle" yield will result.
The usual trick for this is to use an "exploding wire" detonator. Unlike regular detonators, which have an intermediate explosive to start the main explosive, exploding wire detonators do it in one step, by discharging a capacitor bank through a resistance buried in the explosive. This takes a very fast high-voltage high-current switch, and the traditional solution is a krytron, a gas-discharge vacuum tube from the thyatron family. There have been big flaps over the years about various countries trying to acquire krytrons, which aren't classified but are export-controlled.
Krytrons are 1940s technology. This laser ignition system could be its replacement. One big laser pulse pumped through fibers of equal length to each detonation point should do the job. And it's off the shelf dual-use technology.
Can y'all throw in a car analogy? Help a inquisitive brother out.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Sparkplugs cost like, uhm, a dollar.
> Soon the lenses are covered with soot.
I would think it would be self cleaning, wouldn't the laser keep all the crap burned off of the lens ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
...they replace the fuel spray from injectors with heavy hydrogen pellets.
The problem with putting lasers in your engine is that it gets hot in there, and laser lifetime plunges drastically when you run them at elevated temperatures. I'm sure the dealers will love us having to replace our laser-plugs every two months, but no one else will.
(And if you're thinking thermo-electric cooling is the answer, that's going to use a whole lot of juice; don't know how feasible it is.)
We used a similar system starting back in the late 1990s for initiating ordnance systems. The primary explosive would be doped with a small amount of carbon black to enhance absorption. One advantage was that specific equipment was required for proper initiation, which (in theory) made it safer.
Dynamite and a laser beam indeed.
"My truck has spark plugs"
No, it has glow plugs, these only operate when the fuel is cold (ie: at cold start), they stop running when the engine is up to temperature.
"Actually several diesel engines can burn gas for short runs"
No!. Old diesels can tolerate some fuel contaimination, newer common rail, or other high pressure systems can be destroyed by them, with repair values in the $10,000 range.
If you accidentally put petrol in your diesel, do not start it for any reason (This includes moving it away from the pump or onto a tow truck) until the tank and fuel lines have been flushed correctly.
Forget that, I'm still waiting for a car analogy even after scrolling by 90% of the posts.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Hopefully they are dependable. With the heat of engines I'm not sure how long they would last. One good thing is that it'll flood the market with cheap high power lasers. Importing the parts my have to go by the FDA since they regulate lasers.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
>> "So the spark plug could soon join the fax machine in the pantheon of antiquated technologies that will never completely disappear."
Aw, you were so close, but missed the mark. There are many other examples that you could have used and kept with the car theme. For instance,
Carol vs. Ghost
http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=78116&page=1
FTL
For those of you not in the know, Smokey Yunick was a legendary race car mechanic and Popular Science correspondant. He died a couple of years ago. In March 1983 Popular Science carried a story about an engine he had developed that only had two cylinders and 78 cubic inches but developed 150 hp and got 60 mpg when installed in what looks like a Volkswagon Rabbit. He called it his "adiabatic engine." Supposedly all sorts of car companies were quite interested in the engine.
When I see this I will belive the oil companies have given up.
Spark plugs last just as long as they ever did in the same conditions (although some of the new coatings do extend life under given conditions.) The difference is that the engines are more reliable now, and more importantly not under the control of the driver. When you're not free to dump any quantity of fuel you like into the cylinder, it's a lot harder to end up burning up your plugs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's probably a good reason, but why not use microwaves? Wouldn't that be better to ensure even burn?
I've spent entirely too much time under the hood of a car(21 year auto mechanic), and you are entirely incorrect.
Degrading plug wires either cause a misfire, which is blindingly obvious and kills mileage horribly, or doesn't. There is no middle ground.
You are 100% full of shit.
I have personally had intermittent shorts in spark plug wires which caused them to fire fine sometimes. I found the problem by flexing the wire in question while testing it and watching the resistance go from a few kOhms to infinite.
In addition, plug wires can go partly bad, to the point where the resistance will be increased, causing a weak spark on some wires. You can find this problem by laying out all the wires on a table and checking their resistance. Longer wires should have more resistance. If you find a discrepancy, you've got at least one bad wire. Furthermore, in a vehicle with a flaky electrical system (say, one out of three alt. coils is bad) your voltage can be highly RPM-dependent, so you can have good spark only at high RPM.
Modern electronic ignition systems are fairly immune to spark plug wear until extreme circumstances, such as missing three tuneups in a row with standard plugs. Then you will sometimes get drivibility issues and lose 1mpg, tops.
This has relatively little to do with the ignition system and everything to do with the rest of the engine. Since it's computer controlled, the computer tries to prevent you from doing things with your engine that your plugs can't cover (it learns what causes misfires.) The biggest difference there is really that most modern ignition systems have a higher voltage; in the 1960s you might have 20kV, now it's usually more like 80. But you could get a high-performance coil back then; you'd just burn out your points, which we don't have any more.
I would be ASE certified in automotive electronics if I could have afforded the exam back in the day. I am ASE certified in heating/cooling/air-cond. You have just told people things that aren't true, and no amount of experience excuses this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"