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'Plasmatron' may clear the air
Device could help cars' gas-burning efficiency
Monday, November 15, 1999
By TOM PAULSON
It's called a plasmatron and some day it could power your car using the same physical process that fuels the sun, achieving a hundred-fold reduction in smog-producing emissions.
"And it's completely compatible with existing automobile technology," says Daniel Cohn, head of plasma technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cohn will speak on the MIT plasmatron, developed with assistance from Northwest scientists, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's division of plasma physics, on Thursday.
The meeting runs today through Friday at the Seattle Westin Hotel.
Cohn's plasma physics lab at MIT developed the plasmatron, working with scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Plasmas are collections of electrically charged particles sometimes called the fourth state of matter -- after solids, liquids and gases.
Plasmas are the most common form of visible matter in the universe, frequently described as a charged field or ion cloud.
The sun and the stars are high-temperature plasmas. The light in fluorescent bulbs is a low-temperature plasma. Lightning is a moderate kind of warmish plasma.
Cohn first got the idea for using plasma technology from a former Soviet scientist he met in the early 1990s. When the MIT scientists proposed it, some colleagues in the plasma physics community scoffed.
"Skeptics said it wouldn't work because it would take too much energy to run," said Jud Virden, an automotive technology expert at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. Virden and another colleague at PNNL, which is run by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy, helped Cohn develop the plasmatron.
Virden knew Cohn because of PNNL and MIT's collaboration on nuclear fusion research. Fusion reactors depend on high-temperature plasmas to produce nuclear energy.
"Our group was also working on low-temperature plasmas," Virden said.
In 1993, Alex Rabinovich, the former Soviet scientist, came to MIT to continue his work in plasma physics. Rabinovich mentioned to Cohn how he had set up a low-temperature plasma reactor using common fuels to give his lab more than the government-allotted power supply.
"That got us real excited," Cohn said. "We started looking around for how we might put this to use."
Virden was in Flint, Mich., at the time working as a technical liaison between PNNL and companies such as General Motors. Cohn told Virden about Rabinovich's work.
"I said I thought we could make
it work for automobiles," Virden
said. In 1995, Cohn, Virden and Rabinovich joined with Leslie Bromberg of MIT and Jeff Surma at PNNL to make the plasmatron idea for cars into a practical reality. The name for the device was likely Cohn's idea, Virden said.
"I don't know what 'tron' means," Virden said. "I think Dan just thought it sounded neat."
The primary hurdles, Cohn said, were to make the device small and affordable, reduce the electrical demand needed to create the plasma and improve the efficiency of converting fuels to cleaner-burning hydrogen gas.
What they have arrived at after considerable tinkering is a plasmatron that converts some of the fuel to hydrogen gas that is fed back into the regular fuel supply. This hydrogen-rich fuel is sent to the engine where the hydrogen allows the engine to burn the fuel much more efficiently at a lower temperature.
"We think it's the best option for reducing pollution in cars," Cohn said. Tests in a car engine at the Oak Ridge Lab, he said, produced a huge reduction in the emission of nitrogen oxides -- the main contributors to smog. He said the plasmatron, when mass-produced, should cost only a few hundred dollars.
Jeff Surma, who recently left PNNL to work for a private company in Richland, pushed the even more futuristic concept of burning Mazola or any other kind of carbon-containing oil in plasmatrons.
The device, in theory, can produce hydrogen gas from any fuel oil. But it is still limited because it takes too much energy to burn cruder fuel.
If that hurdle can be overcome, Cohn noted, plasmatrons might reduce the need for oil refineries by essentially making the car a "mini-refinery."
Virden noted that plasmatrons could also be used together with the fuel cells being explored for use in electric cars. Fuel cells run on hydrogen gas.
P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The experimental plasmatron is small enough to fit on your car's carburetor, will likely cost only a few hundred dollars and converts gasoline or even corn oil into hydrogen gas with such high efficiency it may become one of our best weapons against air pollution.
Scientists hope to make the plasmatron, designed to fit onto a carburetor, affordable.
Mike Urban/P-I
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