Originally Posted By: Stuart Hughes
Originally Posted By: mechtech2
An odd thing I learned is that the current in a spiral wound ignition wire does NOT travel along the wire - not like a water pipe.
It travels in a field that is produced outside the wire. Plasma?
That's an electrical phenomenon commonly called "skin effect" (more rarely "flashover"). It increases with frequency, whether it's done as a pulse in a spark plug wire or as very high freqency in, say, a microwave relay tower. In fact, in high-fq radio & MW applications, it's so pronounced that the towers are "wired" with hollow copper tubing- commonly called "plumbing"- simply because if they were solid, all that copper in the center would be wasted weight & expense.
And by the way- the best explanation of spark plug wires I've seen is at the Magnecor website. No gee-whiz teenage-get-more-HP-from-XXmm-plugwire-diameter nonsense, just well presented information. You don't have to buy their wires to read, learn from, & appreciate it either. Here's a link; once there, click on "The Truth About Ignition Wire Conductors" to start.
Link: http://www.magnecor.com/magnecor1/main.htm
I wonder if the hollow core is then utilized also as a flow path ?
I'll talk to my brother, who is an electrical engineer in the cell phone industry.
Originally Posted By: mechtech2
An odd thing I learned is that the current in a spiral wound ignition wire does NOT travel along the wire - not like a water pipe.
It travels in a field that is produced outside the wire. Plasma?
That's an electrical phenomenon commonly called "skin effect" (more rarely "flashover"). It increases with frequency, whether it's done as a pulse in a spark plug wire or as very high freqency in, say, a microwave relay tower. In fact, in high-fq radio & MW applications, it's so pronounced that the towers are "wired" with hollow copper tubing- commonly called "plumbing"- simply because if they were solid, all that copper in the center would be wasted weight & expense.
And by the way- the best explanation of spark plug wires I've seen is at the Magnecor website. No gee-whiz teenage-get-more-HP-from-XXmm-plugwire-diameter nonsense, just well presented information. You don't have to buy their wires to read, learn from, & appreciate it either. Here's a link; once there, click on "The Truth About Ignition Wire Conductors" to start.
Link: http://www.magnecor.com/magnecor1/main.htm
I wonder if the hollow core is then utilized also as a flow path ?
I'll talk to my brother, who is an electrical engineer in the cell phone industry.
