The plasmatron is nothing like the orgasmatron in Woody Allen's Sleeper, but it does have engineers like William Taylor breathing heavily. Taylor and his colleagues at ArvinMeritor, the $8 billion (sales) auto supplier, think their funny-sounding invention may solve one of the auto industry's most intractable problems: how to rid the air of those noxious diesel fumes from trucks and buses. If they're right, ArvinMeritor could grab a big slice of a $10 billion market. The plasmatron, whose official name is the plasma fuel reformer, is an aluminum canister about the size of a Big Gulp drink. It acts like a giant spark plug, busting apart a tiny portion of the diesel fuel with an electric charge so that the molecules rearrange themselves into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These gases are then used to clean up smog-producing nitrogen oxides, or NOx.
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