Sparkplug gas ionization

[Francisl]

The gas surrounding the sparkplug is an insulator until the sparkplug fires and ionizes the gas. If we fire the sparkplug at a 15 to 30 Hz rate the gas may not have time to recover and be an adequate insulator between firings. This would prevent the capacitors from reaching a stable high voltage before firing or misfiring.
One solution is to have a stream of fresh gas flowing past the sparkplug. The gas can be recycled if it has time to return to an insulating state.

[mchargue]

My expectation is that the gas would recover sufficiently. There’s plenty of prior art on this. You might want to start with this thread, and follow some of the research links,
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/471/

[Brian H]

And the base rate is expected to be around 330 Hz, over 10X as fast as you speculate.

[Author]

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