Got something interesting for the Sentra in the mail.

[NSR_s30]

So last month I made a post about a ad I saw in Popular Science for a new kind of sparkplug.

zerothread?id=298512

A couple weeks later I had a e-mail from a representive from the company looking for people of Nico to try out the plugs. Alls I had to do is provide the information on the vehicle and my address. So today I received the Pulstar Pulse plugs in the mail. I decided to try them out in the Sentra cause I drive it everyday and will definitely notice if there is at all any gains from these plugs. Soon as the weather is nicer out I'll install them and keep everyone updated on the progress on the plugs compared to stock.















If anyone else is interested in the plugs, I know our sponser sparkplugs.com carries them. Be prepared though cause they're expensive. I however got mine for free.

[NismoB13]

Cool. I'm looking foward to hearing the results of the new spark plugs.

[nsrZ32]

I'm anxious to see how they work out for you

[SHIFT_COUPE]

Sweet deal!

[nlonigro]

As far as price there not bad.. 24.99 for x2. Im guess you will need to order x4 though for a 4cylinder car? im not sure.. But those do look sweet and if they increase gas mileage.. omgoodness im getting them ASAP. after my exhaust / intake my mileage went down in the city.. only getting 200 to 220 miles before i need to refill the gas tank =/ .. but **** on highway i get close to 400.. anywhere from 330 to 380 depending on traffic.

Anyways back to subject 2 orders of those plugs should be good enough right? total price around 50 bones???

[nsrZ32]

As far as price there not bad.. 24.99 for x2. Im guess you will need to order x4 though for a 4cylinder car? im not sure.. But those do look sweet and if they increase gas mileage.. omgoodness im getting them ASAP. after my exhaust / intake my mileage went down in the city.. only getting 200 to 220 miles before i need to refill the gas tank =/ .. but **** on highway i get close to 400.. anywhere from 330 to 380 depending on traffic.

Anyways back to subject 2 orders of those plugs should be good enough right? total price around 50 bones???

You need four spark plugs. I'm pretty sure they're $24.99 each. So about 100 bucks for a set for a 4 cylinder car.

[nametakennow]

Seems to me that putting a capacitor in a spark plug should have been obvious, so I can't imagine that it has much of a benefit or it would have been done before now, but I will definitely be interested to see the results.

[nlonigro]

When you go to there website it shows QTY 2 when you pull up the order page.. Does this mean you get 2 for 24.99?? if thats the case it would only cost 50 bones and not 100. 2 orders of 24.99 with 2 qty per order is only 50 bones. But if thats not the case then yeah 100 bones would cover it. IMO thats not that bad for a performance/torque/throttle reaction/fuel mileage upgrade. Well worth it

[gotak]

I call snake oil.

Let me dissect their website...

"When the ignition signal is sent to a traditional spark plug, it begins to ionize the spark gap. This means that the voltage builds in the gap until a spark can be formed. During this ionization phase, which lasts about 5 millionths of a second, the incoming voltage (which has nowhere to go) heats up ignition components including the spark plug. This is wasted energy. When the ignition voltage overcomes the resistance in the spark gap, the spark is created with an initial discharge of approximately 50 watts. Once created, the spark resides between the electrodes at very low power for over a period of 30 millionths of a second."

The equation of electrical power is P=VI where V is voltage and I is current. While "charging", as this is the term they use, there's next to no current(charging very very small capacitance means very very small currents). No current hence no power transfered. So no wasted energy.

"What is different about a pulse plug is that instead of heating ignition parts during the ionization phase, this energy is stored in the integral circuit inside the pulse plug. When the ignition power overcomes the resistance in the spark gap, the pulse circuit discharges all of its accumulated power - 1 million watts - in 2 billionths of a second!"

There's a law in physic, 1st law of thermodynamics, where it states "Energy can neither be created or destroyed". So they tell us there's 1 million watts of power being discharged in each of their plugs? Did they build a Star Trek style warp core inside each of their plugs? I mean how many watts does your washer and dryer at home use? If they can discharge 1 million watts from the plugs you don't need to add fuel that's explosive enough to break your engine just from super heating the air inside the cylinder. For example my engine is suppose to make 177 HP that's about 131 thousand watts. There's no way my engine can even power a single plug that needs 1 million watts. Cause as the law says you can't get energy from nothing!

Sometimes the auto parts and mod industry makes me sick.

[sirgilbert357]

Well, I don't for a minute think their spark plugs are worth 24.99 each or PER PAIR...I highly doubt they will make any noticeable difference, but the physics do have SOME grounding in truth...think of a stun gun that uses a single 9 volt battery (or smaller) to produce 200,000 volts of electricity between the two electrodes, knocking people out cold. I've never seen anyone knocked out by a 9 volt battery, yet thats what powers the stun gun. It isn't creating energy out of nowhere, its all about how it is stored up and discharged all at once. Its the same concept behind taking a 12 volt power supply from a car and powering a 1000 watt amplifier to drive a set of subwoofers and/or door speakers, etc. I doubt the spark plugs are really that effective or worth the money, but to each their own, I could be wrong.

Check this out: 950,000 volts out of two 3 volt lithium batterys...http://www.stungunscheaper.com...stntx

[sirgilbert357]

One more thing, I'm not sure of the conversion or how it would apply to the spark plugs in question, but volts and watts are two very different measures of electricity. And it is possible to "waste" energy by converting the incoming electricity into heat until the resistance of the spark plug terminals is overcome by the electricity flowing between them and the arc of electricity is discharged (the "spark"). I still say that this "waste" is very negligible, though. The concept is very much like an electric oven that applies positive and negative current to the element and since the electricity is not discharged (as it would be in a spark plug), the stove's heating element gets hot.

[gotak]

Sigh. I don't like having to give lectures on forums but let me give this one a go again.

Power as transfer by electricity is Amps X Voltage dropped. When you have a resistive element like an oven's heating element what happens is that the voltage is dropped all across the element. Thus in that case you get amps x voltage input = power. In other situations such a if you have a voltage divider with two resistors the voltage dropped is as according to good old ohm's law V=IR. In that case if you have one resistor of N Ohms and one of 2N Ohms what you have is 2/3 of the voltage dropped across the 2N resistor and 1/3 across the N ohm resistor. The result is that 1/3 of the power goes to the N resistor and 2/3 to the 2N resistor.

In a spark gap there's no current flow till the spark occurs so there's no power being used at all till the gap sparks. The only storage of energy is in the capacitance of the gap, which is tiny. There's no energy lost in the gap while voltage is building across it since no current flow.

The basic thing is no current = no power transfered, no voltage = no power transfered. And that makes sense since voltage and current is always linked.

When you are talking about kilo volts out of small voltage sources that's not saying there's any way to "generate" more power. If you look at the transformer equations as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer . You will find that you can increase voltage but the resulting "high voltage source" only provides small currents. You don't get any more power from doing so and actually because of inefficiency of such transformers you get less power at the output than the input.

And it's lucky for people who have been on the receiving end of stun guns that we can't generate such high voltage from small voltage sources without significantly reducing the current available at the high voltage end. Cause it's not voltage that kills but current. Wait, pardon me actually its' current X voltage that kills. Cause it's how much energy your body absorbs that causes death.

As for the 1000 Watt amp you hit the nail on the head about storing up energy. However, in the case of the 1000 watt amp you are looking at peak power not RMS power. A lot of times people will sell you an audio product based upon peak power but it tells you nothing since RMS power is the measure that really tells you how loud a system is. So in the case of the amp what it is doing is just using large capacitors to store up some energy which it can occasionally output resulting in 1000 watt. And if you will note the original post I made the claims made by the manufacturer of the plugs said their plugs releases more energy than most car engine can make. There's no way what they are saying is true unless you just run the engine for length of time before firing the plugs but that really defeats the point doesn't it? Since you need the plugs firing to be able to run the engine. Maybe they are plugs designed for diesel engines where you don't need spark plugs?

[nametakennow]

They aren't claiming that there is current flow aside from when the ignition system tells the plug to spark, they're claiming that the minuscule fraction of a second that it takes to ionize the air in the plug gap is where energy waste occurs.

The problem is that even if they do manage to capacitate that energy, it still has to be used to ionize the air at some point, so I can't see how it would magically do so more effectively by being that tiny tiny fraction of a second later.

Regardless, I'm interested to see a before/after dyno and some real-world testing in both economy and power, if only to prove that this makes little sense scientifically.

[NSR_s30]

Soon as I get them installed I l'll let you guys know. Personally I'm not expecting a huge change in the car, but to get them for free and to give the company feed back sure I'm game.

[Dank02seR]

Soon as I get them installed I l'll let you guys know. Personally I'm not expecting a huge change in the car, but to get them for free and to give the company feed back sure I'm game.

Hmmm instead of acting like a rocket scientist like the rest of these goof balls ill just wait tell u put them in and give us results.i read that popular science article about the pulstar plugs and they definitely intrigue me but i have a rule not to test **** out on my car unless its a proven product, needless to say ill stick with the NGk iridium plugs for now but deffently let us know man good job geting the for free BTW

[northhoustonser]

interesting... ill always be game for seeing the results.

[ianh]

How about back to back dyno runs to see if they do make a difference?

[nametakennow]

Some Google searches turned up with several results all along the lines of what Sparkplugs.com found - small hp gains at best, certainly not worth the $$ IMO.

The Sparkplugs.com testing was done with an SRT4. Results below.

[gotak]

The numbers are so close you can hardly even say it's measurable. Slight changes in temp or just having driving in a low pressure weather system might make more of a difference than the plugs.

[NSR_s30]

Some Google searches turned up with several results all along the lines of what Sparkplugs.com found - small hp gains at best, certainly not worth the $$ IMO.

The Sparkplugs.com testing was done with an SRT4. Results below.

Interesting test results, like I said before I doubt the gains will be a huge difference but I'd be happy if there was a notice in power or gas mileage...etc

[NSR_s30]

Got the plugs installed on Sunday, haven't really had good weather to base anything on. Sunday after I installed them I took it for a drive, it might just be me but it seems to pull a little bit harder in 2nd gear. I'll keep you guys updated.

[2.5_slow]

those plugs look high tech lol

[Asmar]

Very nice. I'm looking to get those soon for my B13 also.