A New Spark Plug to Improve the Performances of Combustion Engines: Study and Analysis of Unburned Exhaust Gases

The ignition sparks provided by the conventional spark plug do not always ensure a fast and complete combustion of the hydrocarbon-air mixture. For this reason, we offer a new type of plug with a double spark using two simultaneous discharges generated by a pulsed high voltage-power supply. This work presents the comparison of two spark plugs, a classical one and a double spark plug, by analyzing the unburned hydrocarbon gases from the exhaust pipe of the engine. For a first gasoline engine, we measure the oxygen concentration in the exhaust gases with a lambda probe and the unburned hydrocarbon by the use of GC–MS coupled with SPME extraction technique. We can observe a clear decrease of total unburned hydrocarbon (THC). For a second motor test bench, powered with propane, we complete measures in function of air/fuel ratio of the THC, NOx, CO2 and CO. These results confirm that we obtained a better combustion especially for leaner mixtures.