New Mind - 2019-09-19
The first documented use of a spark plug in an internal combustion engine was attributed to the Belgian Engineer Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir in 1859. Lenoir is known for developing the first internal combustion engine, which burned a mixture of coal gas and air. The air-fuel mixture it aspirated was ignited by a "jumping spark" ignition system, which he patented in 1860. Lenoir’s ignition system created sparks by using high voltage electricity to jump an air gap. This was accomplished by sending mechanically generated low voltage pulses through a type of electrical transformer known as a Ruhmkorff coil. The coil would transform the low voltage pulses into lower current, high voltage pulses, suitable for spark generation. Reliably igniting over 20 million combustion cycles while surviving exposure to the extreme temperatures and pressures of ignited fuel would prove to be a formidable challenge. All spark plugs are fundamentally composed of two electrodes separated by an insulator. These electrodes converge at a «spark gap», where spark generation occurs. As the initial current flows from the ignition coil to the spark plug’s electrodes, the flow of electricity is initially blocked by the insulating properties of the air-fuel mixture within the gap. As the voltage pulse ramps up, the potential created between the electrodes begin to restructure the gases within the spark gap. As the voltage increases further, the insulating limit or the dielectric strength of the spark-gap gases begin to break down, causing it to ionize. The first spark plugs had a very minimal set of operational requirements. Their main design concerns were the plug's fit and position and its ability to maintain an operating temperature range that would allow the plug end to self-clean by burning off deposits. The thermal properties of a spark plug are designated by a relative heat range. The emergence of leaded gasoline in the 1930s would also cause aggressive deposit buildup on the mineral insulator ends. To keep up with this, construction was shifted towards a single piece design composed of a ceramic called sintered alumina. Sintered alumina plugs operated at much higher temperatures, which helped counteractact the fouling issues caused by leaded fuels via deposit burn-off. It’s electrical insulation properties also allowed much higher voltages to be used, tolerating up to 60,000 volts. This would be further improved by the addition of ribs which increased the surface area of the insulator. Modern spark plug still used sintered alumina and can tolerate voltages well past 100,000 volts. The next big change in spark plug design would occur in the form of copper core plugs during the 1970s as a direct result of policy changes. In 1974, the US government began to impose fuel mandates and stricter emissions regulations which prompted the removal of lead from gasoline, the introduction of catalytic converts, and the move to smaller more efficient engine designs. By the 1990s computer controlled ignition systems were becoming common and the need for more energetic spark generation with newer higher compression and forced induced engines was becoming apparent. This was accomplished by moving ignition coils into assemblies that sat directly above the spark plug. Known as coil-on-plug ignition, the one coil per cylinder configuration coupled with the shorter direct path of current flow allows for extremely high voltages to be used, often well past 100,000 volts. On modern fuel injected cars, higher compression ratios as well as tighter control of combustion timing is used to extract as much energy as possible, increasing power and efficiency. As an engine’s rotating speed increases, triggering an ignition event slightly before the point of maximum compression within a cylinder, or advancing timing is done to give the combustion process more time to occur. Under certain conditions uncontrolled combustion can be triggered as smalls pockets of air-fuel mixture explode outside the envelope of the normal spark triggered combustion front. This is known as detonation and it can occur when timing is advanced too aggressively or the air-fuel trim is mismatched for the conditions within the cylinder. Engine knock sensors were developed for this task and they functioned as highly tuned microphones, listening for the tones of sound produced on an engine block as it experiences detonation. The ability to accurately manage detonation also kept combustion chamber designs relatively conservative. During the late 1990's several manufacturers were researching better methods to detect detonation. The advent of ionic detonation detection used spark plugs to sense chamber ionization. SUPPORT NEW MIND ON PATREON https://www.patreon.com/newmind
Seriously I was like " 'story of the spark plug' ? Sounds boring but I'll give it a try" holy smokes this was great. Very interesting!!!
@Steve Thea What the heck are you talking about?... Are you selling something?
@Mahono Steel For anyone buying, I'm willing to undercut this guy by 1 cent until his price reaches $0.0
LOL I kid…no but I'm really serious :|
Moving the cursor with one finger on that little rubber button is hard; not sure how anyone uses it
Sounds boring? Are you kidding me? This sounds absolutely awesome! No,... but seriously I do love this kind of stuff. I'm sorry but I had to comment on that sentence when I saw you wrote "sounds boring". I'm sorry it's,... I couldn't believe you wrote that. it is just hard for me to comprehend the fact that anybody could think that would be boring and I guess that's my problem not yours so I'm sorry...no offence.
I just gave you a thumbs up because I really agree with you this was really really a great story of the spark plug
Been a mechanic (FAA Licensed A&P) for 45+ years. This was an excellent presentation! Never dreamed they used the plug for a knock sensor.
@Richard Cunningham the star gate danger danger will Roberson .mama don't let your babies grow up to build portals
45+ years... spec those years as everybody assumes that is current to -45 years. Stick with your bi-wings sister.
Saab I think it was used the plugs as air/fuel sensors
@William Apodaca I'd have to see evidence of that before I would belive it.
Airrcraft piston engines (except a very few modern diesels, and newest avgas ones that rund FADEC) are basicly stoneage 1938 tech.
Always took spark plugs for granted and thought of them to be uninteresting pieces of equipment..This video changes that..Well researched and crisply presented.
I never thought i would be interested in sparkplugs. Great video as always :)
I did not know that knock detectors were replaced with.. something that was already there :D
@Richard Vaughn
Gasoline actually does have a slight lubricating quality, years ago (80's) I worked at a garage that one of our customers was a local welding and gas supply house that had a small fleet of gasoline powered vehicles (along with a few diesels) that had the gasoline powered ones converted to propane (because they dealt in it) for cost savings, within 2 years they were converting them back to gasoline because the piston rings in the engines were wearing out in a fraction of the time because propane is dry and offers no lubrication qualities while gasoline does, it's true that too rich of a mixture will wash oil from cylinder walls and wear out rings prematurely but you have to look at that in it's correct context, first off that's an extreme and not the ideal AF mixture for the engine anyways, secondly gasoline does have lubricating qualities but not enough for a trade off for oil, and once again propane is a gas which is dry and has no lubrication properties at all so it'll wear out rings faster than a rich AF mixture that's washing down the cylinders.
Gas is not a solvent just because some people use it as one, and solvent is a relative term anyways, diesel is also a solvent used in that context, I myself along with a lot of other people use kerosene in my parts washer which is more closely related to diesel then it is gasoline, but yes, gasoline does have lubricating properties.
@Branden Walsh
Harley Davidson didn't by any stretch of the imagination invent or pioneer the use of ion sensing technology (even though they'll tell people that), you're right about Delphi, they're the ones that brought to Harley for their use, even the narrator of this video got something wrong about all that, he mentioned the 90's as being the beginning of it's use when in fact it was first used by one of the Japanese auto company's in the mid 80's, it was patented in 1982 by some fella in Japan that didn't even work in the car industry he was just some real smart guy who figured it out and applied for and recieved a patent for it, the American car companies started using it in the early 90's but all the Japanese car makers had been using it by the end of the 80's.
You'll never see a knock sensor (piezoelectric microphone) on a Harley Davidson for several reasons and they all have to do with noise, first off is when they get into severe duty (like parades or traffic jams) they get hot and engine parts start clattering around, any noises like that will confuse the computer into thinking that the engines knocking and it'll attempt to correct the problem, even that aside with people putting loud exhausts on powerful engines someone next to you could have an exhaust that'll hit your engine and activate the knock sensor leading to the same problem as before.
You do understand that gasoline in the cylinder is a vapor and not a liquid and that a vapor does not lubricate? There is never a situation where liquid gasoline is present in the cylinder. Also where I come from farmers have been using propane powered gasoline engines on antique tractors and pickup trucks since forever and they often last longer than the gasoline powered equivalents. There is one tractor I know of that's 60 years old that was sold new with a propane tank on the front that they still use for grading gravel parking lots. The piston rings are lubricated by motor oil that squeezes past the oil control ring and not by fuel. This is why 2 stroke motors that use crankcase scavenging require motor oil to be added to the gasoline. If the propane converted engines were failing it was because something was wrong preventing oil from getting past the rings.
@Richard Vaughn
Gasoline is not a vapor in the cylinder, that's called a hot vapor engine and they never really got beyond the testing stages in vehicles (or anything else for that matter), and yes, once again gasoline does have a slight lubricating property, it doesn't dissolve entirely into the air like naphtha, it leaves a film behind which is a good bit oil, if you don't believe me look at the American Petroleum Institute's (API) own information on the subject, gasoline even has a lubrication rating, there's all kinds of papers that have been written by research facilities that are available online on the very subject of gasolines lubrication abilities.
I've been building engines for a long time and have many years experience as a mechanic, I have first hand seen the results of gasoline powered vehicles that were converted to run on propane and there's a reason that the company had the vehicle's converted back to gasoline, this was a fleet of vehicles that get driven daily, I'm not making an evaluation based on one machine that gets run a couple of times a year, I've only been doing this since 1981 but hey, if you wanna sit there and argue about it knock yourself out because I already know better.
Gasoline turns into a vapor at room temperature. This is why carburetors work. The carburetor releases a small jet of liquid gasoline into the air flow so that it immediately turns to vapor to increase the surface area of the gasoline exposed to oxygen.
You act like propane fueled gasoline engines are rare and unreliable. Back in the old days gasoline was an expensive fuel and farm equipment was ran on alternative fuels. Gasoline engines were adapted to burn kerosene and propane strait out of the factory. In fact its still completely common to see propane powered pickup trucks driving around in rural areas. So basically you don't know anything at all about propane powered gasoline engines. Its likely what you are describing is cylinder wall glazing which is caused by idling the vehicle at low cylinder temperatures which does not burn off carbon and fills in the crosshatching allowing excessive blow-by. Gasoline does burn at a higher temperature than propane (which is also why propane vehicles have really long oil change intervals). For example: propane forklifts use generic looking gasoline engines and this has been the dominant way of doing things since forever.
6:45 my buddy put a non resistor plug in his late 70s Honda Elsinore dirtbike.
The snow the neighbor got on the TV drove him nuts every time my buddy ran his bike 😂
these videos teach me more in 15 minutes then school does in a semester
Makes you wonder who on earth could give this a thumbs down
@Jim Alley Why would Elon dislike an electric car plug?
Someone who fills their tank by the gallon
As a genuine ignorant person on mechanical matters, this was understandable and fascinating. Cheers Sparky.
New plugs going 100k miles plus, vs old cars from even the 60s that replaced em every 5-10k, that's pretty awesome.
Spark plug related problems are really low on the scale anymore compared to back then.
Very interesting, and a bit more in depth than the usual 10min info-edu-entertainment video here on YouTube. You deserve more views!
This is premium content
😎👍
yeah at 3:60/gal apparently.
Great video. Subscribed and thumbs up!
Is there a Patreon page? Love the straight-to-the-point format. No nonsense, no faffing around. Would love to support to keep it this way.
Fantastic video! I've been a mechanic for 23 years, this was breathtakingly thorough!
Yay electric cars! Being a mechanic was fun when I was younger, but I'm so over it. I'm looking forward to having a car that will just keep driving longer than I will, without service.
I can only imagine how much time was spent researching for the material and presentation. Big Thumbs up.
Please do a video on Engine Management System
Remember the days when you popped the bonnett, got out your socket set and ten minutes later half your engine service was done cos the new plugs were in . . . . . . . . These days i cant even imagine where my plugs are . . . . . .great mini docu and it made me quite nostalgic for the days when I could work on my engine.
A touching and beautiful ode to the humble spark plug. Never thought I’d have genuine feelings about a car part, but you did her justice! Brava!
I know this got recomended because I spent an hour looking for the part number for my plugs
@11:00 hey! That’s Portland! Haha I miss Portland. But I don’t miss the homeless!
Really appreciate and love the technical details you add to you videos.
This was recommended to me after I bought and installed a new spark plug for my weed eater. How did they know?
Glad I stayed till the end of the vid! Repurposing the spark plug to a sensor was really cool and intuitive! Great vid
L
@Planet Killer Kitten I agree. There are numerous ways to improve the efficiency of modern combustion engines and the vehicles surrounding them. Most regulations on emissions ruin the lifespan and efficiency of an ICE (Internal Combustion Engine). Newer designs do much better, like the Hyundai Ioniq Blue 4 cylinder automatic at 58 avg mpg. Other designs like the 2 cylinder sequential-automatic turbodiesel Volkswagen XL1 get between 57-140mpg due to the aerodynamics (I disagree with their engine intake and exhaust locations), small engine, low rolling resistance design. If the first Insights had better frontal aerodynamics and lower friction materials they would probably get 60-100mpg back in the early 2000s. Newer all-electrics like the Prius PHV Solar, the Lightyear One, or the Sono Motors Sion all take advantage of common sense solutions. Especially the Lightyear One.
Even beyond these and the ever decreasing coefficient of drag of current production models, there is PLENTLY (20%+) of room to improve on the engine and waste energy management systems.
For example: Don't waste a quarter of the combustion energy just heating up the water jacket flowing around the cylinders only to waste more mechanical energy running a big fan and water pump to cool it off again, use low thermal conductivity high temperature ceramics and microporous low friction wall liners;; 30-50% of all your combustion energy going out the exhaust as a low pressure high temperature and humidity gas? Use an energy recovery system for a free kilowatt (not too much backpressure!);; Dynamic compression ratio only around 10.8:1 before ignition? Get some stronger lighter connecting rods and pistons along with some good floating wrist pins and stronger thinner low friction piston rings;; Cylinder still have carbon deposits that preignite and you got bad NOx? Get rid of that EGR and pass the PCV BullSh through the ORVR, burn hotter and leaner like the turbine power plants figured out long ago, improve atomisation, heat the fuel rail and increase pressure above 130psi, cool off or replace those poppit valves and spark plug protrusions;; Journal bearings and seals getting scratched up by little 20um particles of TRASH marring up your engine that your oil filter lets through? You should have gotten a 1 micron bypass filter a long time ago. Its important not to let dust or dirt into the intake, meaning have a good air filter and who the hell thought of passing PCV and EGR straight into the intake.
There is more. Much more. LIke how we don't need permanent side view mirrors sticking out or open wheel wells to churn up the air.
Also helps diagnose misfire and firing orders on an expensive Snapon scan tool if your a mechanic.
@Ryan Plethra carburetors have numerous problems. especially with the fuel distribution on multi-level intake runners or from one port to another and finnicky atomisation that relies only on the somewhat low velocity air pulled in during intake strokes. there are much better ways to improve the design of an ICE. just heating the fuel leading up to a carburetor improves power and combustion efficiency for instance because the fuel breaks up and vaporises more when it is introduced to the flow of cold air.
I've thought about all this a lot. Some things I recommend are more practical than others, some with more benefit than others. There are many other things I didn't talk about that you can find (some of) on my comment on the Groom Lake channel's video about design ideas. They are a cool team that actually responds to silly questions and they provided good interesting info and ideas. We even debunked the American Methheads' conspiracy around GEET engines, and suggested improvements to the flawed design... primarily don't add so much dang water.
1 word battery. no not. they start with the spark plug and end with electric car battery. how does this happen. it is the plan to brainwash weak low information environmentalism . the left is the new reigion man made global warming or man made climate change is the new religion. The object leads the subject. 2nd is 1st. 1st is 2nd. every thing is upside down in reverse inside out.
Interesting. I knew modern engines had cylinder misfire detection using signal processing of the signals produced by the spark plug coils. I didn’t know the ECU can detect detonation from the coils also. I thought it was all done by the knock sensors
Saab came out with that engineering process. GM adopted it when they bought out Saab. I never knew that until I took one of the engine courses at the GM training center over ten years ago.
I know that with Ford, as early as the 2000's (I'm not sure about the 2004 and earlier 2 valve 5.4L/4.6L, but the 2004 and later 3 valve 5.4L/4.6L could do this), the ECU could detect if the coil fired or not, because it receives a feedback signal from the coil. The aforementioned engine still had a knock sensor on each bank, and the ECU could only trim fuel on a per bank basis (each 4 cylinders). It could also detect misfires by the absence of a slight increase of rotational torque of the crank (via the crank wheel and sensor, which was accurate to 10 degrees of crank rotation)
1:25 Your depiction is slightly inaccurate. The breaker points should be normally closed. The cam lobe should momentarily open the points. You have it backwards.
REASON: A coil needs to be saturated. That means it needs to be energized the longest it can be. When the circuit is broken, the coil field will collapse producing the spark current.
The way you have it here would produce a very weak spark because the coil was only partly saturated. I like your video...
When are you going to make video on turbocharging direct injection and Variable valve timings?
Well, that sparked my interest.
"You have to knock out the knocks!" - Bob Hope
I've been building & racing bikes all my life and I never knew they were using the spark plug as a knock sensor... Well there ya go.....
Damn, just changed the six burned out spark plugs in my car, did f realize how damn fine tuned they are.
Very well made and informative!
Wow
Nice video
Make video on fuel injector!!
12 volts charges the coil, creating a magnetic field in the coil, power turns off and the magnetic field collapses creating a high voltage that runs back through the coil, the shortest path to ground is the negative side of the spark plug. Voila sparks, thousands of times per minute.
Boy did I just learned a lot, Thank you; it seems the more l thought I know, the more I didn't know, ya know, lol.
Years ago I had a spark plug from my father’s 1904 motorcycle, the insulator was not ceramic. It was green coloured wood with the name lodge on it.
Great video, although I disagree with the end about electric cars ushering in the death of gasoline vehicles. It is more likely to happen with hydrogen powered cars than electric.
The most well informed explanation of spark plugs ever made. Thank you!
I really enjoy watching your channel! Good job
This video made me hit subscribe very quickly. I learned a lot in a short time, no frills, no fluff, no annoying soundtrack. Just good informative, interesting content. Thank you!
I've really enjoyed this one, thank you
Should be a law against having so much good information so quickly.
Absolutely great and extremely interesting video, thank you. Liked and subscribed.
Your decent pronunciation of French ("Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir") and German ("Ruhmkorff") words is testament to your attention to detail.
11:00 The description of combustion causing detonation in a cylinder regarding ignition timing is incorrect. The result of timing set to early is peak cylinder pressure before TDC thus pushing against the direction of rotation. Fuel air ratios and a fuels resistance to detonation can influence the speed of the combustion however. Ignition timing has no affect on random preignition events caused by fuel air ratios or the fuels resistance to detonation. Both of these CAN cause detonation unrelated to ignition timing.
Nice vid bro! Hey, could you give me the link of that little clip inside the cylinder? When the sparkplug detonates the gas? Thanks!
Please, teach me more about those mundane car parts! Never thought you'd get past it's a plug that makes Sparks haha
VERY interesting and VERY well explained. Even I understood it! Cheers from DownUnder.
Awesome video, y'all. Thank you.
Beautiful technology, that we all take too much for granted, even hating on fossil fuels - while forgetting that it, literally, fuels our modern world.
Impressive as always! Thanks for sharing your knowledge in such a way, that it is pure fun to learn!
Warped Perception - 2019-12-20
I can tell you love doing voice overs! Also that thumbnail is "lit" very nicely.
Warped Perception - 2020-02-22
@Swampy thank you!
Justin time - 2020-07-22
@Warped Perception you are awesome I just wanted to say that when I saw your reply here keep doing what you doing I watch every video you do because I think you're awesome!
SeagIe - 2020-09-10
an 8 month old commment from an absolute beast on an almost million view video only has like 6 likes. Incredible.