Thursday, October 16, 2025

PAP Section G-8: Fuel System Calibration (Dynon)

 In order to calibrate the fuel system in the Dynon software, data points must be taken starting with an empty tank as fuel is added in two-gallon increments until the tank is full.  The software generates a table of gallons vs.voltage output from the rotary resistor hooked to a float which was installed in the tank when it was built (as I recall, construction of the fuel tank was the first thing in the build to earn the characterization Klöster Föken).  This float-type fuel quantity sensor is not to be confused with the mechanical back-up fuel gage (also with a float).  It made sense to do this now since the tank was already empty from the weight-and-balance section.

Step one was to get 20 gallons of ethanol-free mogas in cans. Fortunately, it's available from the FBO here at my home base at KLMO.  So with four five-gallon cans of fuel, I proceeded to fill a two-gallon can and pour it in the tank until all the data points were recorded.  The Dynon looks like this as the table gets populated:



The only problem occurred when I went past 12 gallons.  The system was recording the data points but wouldn't display them.  I tried every way I could think of to scroll down but no go.  I ended up continuing the process, unable to see the voltage values corresponding to the rest of the data points.  When it's all done, you can edit the table and see everything.  The right-most knob then allows scrolling.  The data looks like this:

 

Being an engineer I couldn't help myself so I did a curve fit of the data to be sure there weren't any wonky points.  Looks good.  Amazingly so considering that I filled a two-gallon container ten times, each time eyeballing the fuel level and the two-gallon mark on the container to be sure they aligned.

Next up is the carb sync, coming soon to a browser near you.  In the bigger picture, I've secured a DAR do to the airworthiness inspection but we're dead in the water due to the government shutdown.




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