Friday, April 12, 2019

Pondering on fuel system

I think I found a good fuel surge tank. It's a "universal" version with 6 AN8 connections. There are several manufacturers of similar devices, and they can be had for 1 to 4 L sizes. A 2L tank seems to be suitable for me. It's simply an aluminium box with 6 holes in it.


Looking a bit closer at these tanks, it should be very easy to make an inverted system, with no moving parts, no flop tube. I may do that later on, it shouldn't be more to it than installing two tanks in series, like the sketch below.


Normal flying would cause no change. Gravity fills up both surge tanks.

When inverted, the inlet line will eventually be evacuated, while the vent line will close due to the gravity valve (also off the shelf racing part). The first tank will then gradually empty, while the second tank remains full.


When applying positive G again, the second tank will gradually empty while the first tank gets filled up. When the first tank is filled up, fuel starts flowing into the second than and they both eventually gets filled up. It should work I think, but should probably be tested in the shop first :-)

There are a few snags here, like what will happen if the aircraft goes inverted again, before the second tank is filled up completely? but nothing that can't be fixed by positioning the outlet to the EFI pumps vertically down towards the middle, and sizing the tanks correctly. The first tank should be smaller than the second. It would probably be better to build them as one single invertible surge tank.

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