‘Lightning bolt' approach to fuel ignition

Dan Singleton was a graduate student on a research project a few years ago, showing the U.S. Navy how a powerful new technology called "pulsed power" could help start up an aircraft carrier quickly, when it occurred to him that the same technology would apply to automobiles. Today, Singleton and his fellow researchers run Transient Plasma Systems, a Los Angeles company proposing an innovation in vehicle ignition that, after more than a century, would replace spark plugs. CEO Singleton, 38, explained the point of the new science to News Editor Lindsay Chappell. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: What is Transient Plasma proposing to do?

A: Spark ignition has been unchanged since the invention of the car. This is a new way of igniting the fuel.

How is it different?

In a regular spark ignition, you're igniting a fuel-air mixture with heat, and it takes some time to vibrate the molecules and get combustion going. Our technology is more like a lightning bolt. The chemistry is faster. You get a low-temperature plasma that can ignite mixtures that a spark just can't ignite.

How much faster?

It is a nanoseconds- long pulse: 10 nanoseconds. Traditional sparking takes milliseconds. So our process is orders of magnitude faster.

With a thermal reaction, a spark, you're trying to vibrate molecules to break bonds, and that takes time. What we're doing is different. There are electrons in the vehicle's fuel-air mixture. We apply this 10 nanoseconds-long high-electric field to accelerate those electrons across the gas like a bullet. They smash into the fuel-air molecules and break the oxygen into two. That makes the reaction quicker.

Why would automakers want this?

This is a tool to let them change to a cleaner-burning system. The bottom line is CO2 emission. We're all reading about the move to electrics, and we assume that EVs are going to dominate the market in 2035 and on.

But before we get to 2035, hundreds of millions of vehicles with combustion engines will still be sold and continue emitting trillions of pounds of CO2. We can't just wait for electric vehicles. We have to start reducing emissions significantly now. Advanced ignition unlocks the biggest jump in CO2 reduction of any other technology.

How is the auto industry responding?

It's been a long road. There was some bad press in the past for ignition solutions that weren't real. So the industry was skeptical of our story at first. But our first test, produced with Sandia National Laboratories' Combustion Research Facility, got us in the door.

In this era of EVs, do automakers have any interest in an innovation for combustion engines?

They do, although it's true that R&D dollars for combustion engines are getting reduced. In the past, they might have wanted to work with us. But because of the shift in spending, they're saying, "We've frozen our combustion engine design and we're focusing on EVs. You guys come to us with a complete system." And that's fine. It just means that it's going to take longer. But we're ready.