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Old 10th May 2011, 22:04
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FlyingStone
 
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Not quite... See, in ordinary carburetted aircraft engine, the fuel is mixed with air in the carburettor, which is usually at the very beginning of the induction system. The mixture of air and fuel is then delivered to cylinders via induction pipes and intake ports. But this system usually ends up delivering different mixtures of fuel and air to cylinders (e.g. one cylinder may be running very lean and it may not even fire if you lean while the other may be running too rich), which isn't the optimum, if you want to run your engine at peak EGT or even LOP (lean of peak).

So, the fuel injected engines were developed, where fuel is mixed with air at each cylinder intake port. So if you have 4 cylinder engine, which I believe is your case, the air is routed through the fuel-air control unit via induction pipes to intake ports. The fuel on the other hand is routed through the fuel-air control unit, which meters the required fuel flow and sends fuel to the fuel manifold, from where you have 4 (or as many cylinders/injectors you have) fuel pipes going to each injector. You can recognise the manifold as a round "box" on the top of the engine which has 4 (could be 6 or even more) small outgoing pipes (metal, not rubber/plastic) going to the injectors. The injectors are placed in the intake port, quite close to the intake valve. So let's take a look of that again: we have air coming into the intake port via induction pipes and fuel coming into the intake port via injector. So again, basically: in fuel-injected system, fuel is mixed with air in the intake port of each cylinder (contrary to carb engines, where air is mixed only once, regardless of number of cylinders - exceptions are multi-carb engines, but I'm not very familiar with those).

Take a good look of this and this pictures, which represent Continental IO-240 engine (I couldn't find equally good picture of Lycoming IO-360). On the first picture, look at the right bottom: there is a fuel injection pump mounted to the engine itself. From there, you have a red hose, which brings fuel to the fuel-air control unit, which is located at the front top of the engine (you can even see the butterfly valve). From then, the air splits into four induction pipes toward each cylinder. The fuel on the other hand goes below the pipes to the fuel distribution manifold, which you can find on the top rear of the engine. On the second picture you can very easy see the connection from the fuel manifold to the fuel pressure sensor and then forward to the fuel pressure gague. From the fuel manifold you have 4 metal pipes, each leading to fuel injector, which is actually located perpendicular to the piston's travel and can be recognised by the fact that it is smaller than spark plug (which you probably know what to look for).
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