UncleFester

The misfire was happening because the mixture was too lean. I still to this day have never seen a vehicle run with a leaner mixture than 24:1, other than the Honda lean burn systems.

The best design I have found for plasma is a plug that has no metal above the center electrode. Just the center electrode alone with a large space between it and the ground side seems to build large volumes of plasma. Anything above the center electrode seems to hinder plasma production when it is viewed at high speed. The camera footage shows plasma develop as the spark makes contact between the center electrode and the plug body, then a plasma stream develops and builds to it's maximum. If there is something above the center electrode the plasma reaches that point and hits it, when this happens it tries to push around it, but since the J-electrode is a ground point it's like it's hitting a brick wall and cannot develop the plasma ball further.

P.S. The ball electrode design had major problems in that it would vibrate under combustion and eventually the ball would break off and fall into the cylinder until it finally got around the exhaust valve. The plugs also developed fractures in the ceramic surrounding the center stud that the ball is connected to. When the ball vibrates it cracks the ceramic and causes pieces of ceramic to fall into the cylinder until they get pushed out the exhaust port. This problem occurred with the latest design that had a larger center ball electrode.

Tad

P.S. We also used the Firestorm in some waterspark experiments. But they perform the same as any cheap plug used on the normal Waterspark thread in this forum. This was also a shame because I was hoping the plugs would produce enough pressure with water to drive a piston, but they did not. It would fire the water just like any other plug and then the water would reform and turn into either atmospheric, or a slight vacuum in the chamber. We made high speed footage of this which is very interesting to watch. It's almost like a fireworks display when viewing the ultra high speed camera footage in slow motion.

Tad

Hi Glen,

Yeah, I was very disappointed. I wanted this to work so badly that I dreamt about it every night and what it could do for the world. I was called in by the investor to build the circuitry for testing the plugs in a pressurized nitrogen chamber. We had 50k frames per second cameras set up to view what was happening inside a combustion chamber with the Firestorm plugs. I built many different driver setups because Bob always said I was not building them right for the tests, although he had no electronics experience to show what he wanted me to build. So I built variable 1-500 Hz pulse generator capable of driving ignition coils up to 450 volts. I also added a capacitor discharge diode string to dump large amounts of current (up to 120 joules). I also built a multiple spark discharge system capable of up to 10 joules per discharge.

We were getting massive plasma balls built up inside the plug cage/ball, but there was nothing special about the plugs in general. Even though Beryllium copper is a fairly tough alloy (toxic too though), it could not handle repeated discharges in the 5 to 10 joule range without sublimating the material, therefore the plugs would have short lives under these conditions. The claim that the plugs would never wear out is entirely false.

The other problem I had was that the cage design was actually hindering the formation for larger amounts of plasma because the plasma ball would reach outside the cage only slightly and never extend further. I was in the lab one night after everyone went home and I took a very inexpensive champion plug and took the resistor out, made a stud to slip into the ceramic body, and cut the J-electrode off. I found this plug performed far better than the Firestorm. It would develop large amounts of plasma (almost twice what the Firestorm was capable of) because it had nothing on the end of the plug to hinder large formations of plasma. I was tried and left the lab but forgot to pull the Champion plug from the chamber. The next day the investor and Bob came in and fired up the test I still had set up from the night before. When I came in shortly after they were running the tests, the investor looked at me and said "Why are we working on the Firestorm? This modified Champion plug works much better!". I of course had no answer for him and was embarrassed that I had left the setup intact from the previous night.

After that it was all downhill. Bob was trying to hold onto this investor money in any way he could even though the Firestorm's performance was mediocre at best. I kept telling Bob that whatever the results were we needed to not embellish the results just to keep the investor on the hook. This investor was a super nice man who put us up in a brand new condo in Provo, Utah. Gave us spending money somewhere in the $3500 per month each, and took care of all other expenses. I was ashamed that Bob would string this guy out by continually promising him miraculous results that we could not show. Bob never showed us any data from Lotus engineering, which was very fishy. Normally you get printouts of not only air/fuel ratio's but also horsepower and emissions data. This is STANDARD for any high end dynomometer running in a well known laboratory. Nor could Bob give us any contact that could confirm the test data he had apparently accumulated over many apparent test runs of the plugs in vehicles.

We finally got access to Utah Valley University and their awesome equipment to run tests in an actual car. We put the highest end ignition drivers from MSD that we could get (they cost us somewhere in the 500 dollar range). They were 5 joule output per unit and we had two units. This should have been more than enough energy to make the plugs work to optimum. We ran a modified computer in Bob's T-bird that would allow us to vary the air fuel ratio all the way up to 60:1. The car ran good at normal air/fuel ratios, but when we ran it on the dyno and started to lean it out it would misfire and the hydrocarbon emissions would go through the roof showing we were not burning the fuel once it became leaner than 20:1. We ran test after test showing the same thing. bob blamed it on how the plugs were machined (they were flawlessly machined on really nice CNC equipment, highly polished finished etc. Then he would blame it on the electronics from MSD, not enough power, even though we already knew that the plugs fired fine on 5 joules or even less (down to 1.5 joules was fine for plasma formation).

Horsepower was the same across all tests, with normal plugs and stock ignition we got 125 horsepower out of the stock V-8. With MSD ignition we got 125 horsepower. And with Firestorm and MSD ignition we got 125 horsepower. Emissions improved about ten percent with the MSD ignition regardless of what plugs we used. Idle was much smoother with the aftermarket ignitions regardless of the plugs used.

We put the plugs into the investors Toyota Tundra V-8 and the computer was constantly giving us error codes for Ignition malfunction. This is because the plugs have no resistor to help with transients. We found that if these plugs were used in normal vehicles with computers they would need to modify the computer system with better transient protection or the computer would malfunction or fail due the the stray transients the plugs and ignition would create. Also on coil over plug systems it would require a re-design of the coil system so that topping capacitors or diode strings could be used for form plasma. These would require working directly with automotive manufacturers and would require millions of dollars to change the ignition systems and would require many hundred of hours to re-engineer the systems. This would be difficult to convince the auto manufacturers to do, and also would be difficult to get them to pay to do it on top of giving Bob a royalty form the sales of the system.

So all in all it's a pipe dream that has no basis in fact. As sad as it sounds I still think Bob is a decent guy, he just throws wild claims out without thinking of the consequences or how much money might be wasted chasing something that was never proven even on paper before starting tests. All this data on our tests I still have along with footage of the Dyno tests etc. I still have the circuitry we used to test these plugs, it has all been sitting in boxes.

I'm sorry the results did not back up the claims, and there is another angel investor who will probably never invest in "alternative energy". But those are the facts and truths we found while working on this system.

Tad

Firestorm

I guess all my comments and test data from the time I spent with Krupa in Utah got throw out or edited out. Krupa is still living out of his car or living in people's RV's. Currently he is down near Bullhead city working with the doctor who is working on the Air turbine.

6 months of building and testing Firestorm, and over 200k American dollars, the results were null and void. There was no gain in horsepower, nor was there any mileage gain, nor did Krupa ever show any documentation form Lotus engineering and their tests of running an engine at over 24:1 on the Firestorm plugs. Our investor finally gave up on the project.

Bob is now looking for new investment into the plug but still has not show any test data nor anyone who could confirm the test results he still claims are valid.

Tad