Billionaire Boys Club Member Forum (BBCMF)

[mick]

COMBUSTION ENGINE <> Squeezing more efficiency out of internal combustion engines is a difficult challenge. Engineers have been designing and redesigning car engines for more than a century, and in recent years progress has slowed. To Biswas, the problem came down to one thing: a better spark plug.

That's the gist of what Biswas, now a mechanical engineering researcher at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues have developed. Working with researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories, they have produced the prototype of a small "plasma igniter" that could replace spark plugs, nudging the fossil fuel in engine cylinders to give up its energy in a much cleaner, more efficient way.

Biswas' prototype, which is about the size of a cereal box, could potentially help tame the gas engine's massive contribution to climate change. "When you use plasma, engines can operate with undetectable levels of emission, and much smaller amounts of gas," he says.

The spark plug, which hasn't changed much in 200 years, is used in all non-diesel vehicle engines to ignite the compressed gasoline-and-air mixture in an engine piston. The result is an explosion of energy released by the burning fuel, powering the vehicle's wheels—or treads or propellers, as the case may be.