In Full Flow

Leading fuel flow meter producer Sentronics talks us through the intensive product development programme that has helped it scoop the Formula 1 supply contract for 2018/19.

- Gemma Hatton

Motorsport engineers are notorious for going to any length to gain performance. For example, the latest fuel flow meter (FFM) variants can achieve accuracies of better than one percent and yet teams have still invested time and money to find a small advantage here. In some cases they’ve purchased several fuel flow sensors for testing and established which one under-reads the most. By fitting this they can squeeze an extra few tenths of a percent of fuel into the engine, while still complying with the regulations. It’s quite clear, then, why these devices need to be as accurate as possible.

Mechanical flow meters traditionally use an impeller located between the inlet and outlet of a pipe. The flow of the fluid spins the impeller and the number of revolutions are counted; measuring the flow rate. However, in a racing engine a mechanical system cannot keep up with the highly dynamic changes in flow rate caused by moving from zero to maximum throttle within a fraction of a second.

‘An impeller has mass by its very nature,’ says Neville Meech, director of Sentronics. ‘As a result of this, when the impeller attempts to rotate at a rate matching fuel consumption the inertial effects will cause the device to overshoot and then undershoot, resulting in immediate measurement errors.’

Solid state