New Spark Plug Technology in the making.

The Latest in Spark Plug Technology with Pulstar

The spark plug was first developed in 1860 by Etienne Lenoir in his first internal combustion engine, but it wasn’t until the invention of the commercially-viable high voltage spark plug as part of a magneto-style ignition system by engineer Gottlob Honold in 1902 that the development of the internal combustion engine was made possible. Since that time, the basic principle of the spark plug has remained largely the same. Until now, that is.

The folks at Pulstar boast a line of plugs that aren’t your average spark plug. These Pulstar plugs are claimed to be designed to not only deliver additional horsepower and torque, but increase fuel economy as well. To learn more about these radical plugs and how one can best select the proper plugs, we sat down with Pulstar founder and President Lou Camilli, who could be best described as a walking encyclopedia of science and electrical energy knowledge.

Putting the Pulse In Pulstar

So what is the Pulstar Pulse plug, and what makes it so different from other spark plugs on the market, you ask? Interestingly, the Pulstar Pulse plug was created not through the inspiration of the automobile, but of science. The Pulse plug applies technology developed at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, known as Pulsed Power Technology, which is used to generate and apply energetic beams and high power energy pulses. And through plasma research supported by the scientists and engineers at Sandia derived from ultra-high power electrodynamics, the technology behind the Pulse Plug was born. The result is a plug that Pulstar boasts as virtual replacement for the age-old spark plug.

The Pulse Plug looks like a standard plug on the outside, but on the inside is a capacitor that stores energy each firing cycle and releases it in a high-energy pulse. In essence, Pulstar has completely redesigned how the 100 year old spark plug operates and claims it has made the combustion process far more efficient.

And while the Pulse Plug may look like your ordinary spark plug on the outside, it’s what inside that matters. With the Pulse Plug, electrical energy from your engine’s ignition coil is stored in a capacitor within the plug, which is released in a powerful and quick two-nanosecond high-energy pulse when needed. They claim these plugs incorporate a current peaking capacitor to increase peak spark power from 50 watts in traditional plugs to over 1,000,000 watts of fuel igniting power.


Behind The Technology
Over the years, many attempts have been made to take the spark plug to a new level, but the basic principle has remained the same for more than 100 years. The traditional plug has an insulator and an air gap, and a spark is created. But as Camilli explains, auto makers have for years worked around the design limits of the spark plug, with cam phasing, direct injection, stratified charge, and other modifications to get the fuel into the spark.

This cutaway diagram displays the differences between the Pulse Plug and a traditional spark plug. Where an air gap resides between the resister and gas seal in a spark plug, the Pulse Plug houses a built-in capacitor.