I purchased one of theses professionally made Piggy back Plasma Ignition Boxes that have come out on the market in the last couple of years (Brand name with held as this is not about the manufacturer. ) and installed it on a vehicle to see how well it works.
The main purpose of the purchase was for fuel economy benefits. I am into ""lean burn'" and run the engine at cruise and slight acceleration at around 16:1 air fuel ratio. The engine is a 6 cylinder with programmable fuel injection where I can adjust all aspects of engine management, the most important being fuel and spark. I was hoping to run the engine slightly leaner than what I already do. I was even happy to get a 0.25 A/F leaner running engine without stumble.
The install was very simple and the spark produced by the unit is large (visually) compared to the stock spark.
As some may or may not know, very lean mixtures are probably the hardest to ignite in an ICE, so I thought this would be a good test to see how much of a benefit the plasma spark gave.
I leaned off a section of the map to the point of giving a slight stumble with normal spark. With the unit switched on I could then see if it provided any benefit by gettting rid of the stumble.
The result was no change.
I was also hoping that I could lean off the idle mixtures as I have to run these at around 12.5:1 a/f ratio to maintain a steady idle in this particular engine (I attribute this mainly to slow airspeed in the ports at idle). The result was with the unit on I could detect no change in idle quality or the ability of the unit to allow an increase in idle air/fuel ratio.
I have previously experimented with ignition systems and have had positive results experimenting with gap, spark plug projection, dwell, voltage increase to coil, different coil types.
So far I have seen no benefits in the "lean burn"" application from using the plasma box.
At this stage I am yet to test economy or power on the dyno but will keep updated in the comming weeks/months if anyone is interested.
Whilst I have seen benefits from improved spark, and I expected some benefit from a Plasma Spark, it seems the Plasma Spark is just not doing it for me so far.