Virtually all of us depend on our vehicles for survival. As such, we all face the constant worry of not knowing just what is going on underneath the hood. The anticipation of difficult (and often costly) vehicle problems can be a major source of stress that none of us need. However, we need to discuss a problem that few vehicle owners think about, and that is the problem of air bubbles in the fuel tank.
Why Does It Happen?
As your car goes down the road, the fuel in the tank will naturally slosh around and mix with the air inside the tank, resulting in a fuel that is filled with bubbles. A quick look at this demonstration will give you a better idea of how it all goes down. To clarify, this is mainly a problem with diesel engines. In fact, diesel engines are made to work by mixing air with fuel, but when too much air is present, performance issues will quickly arise.
The nature of a diesel engine is that it takes up the fuel and injects it into the engine at just the right moment, mixing the fuel with air at a certain ratio before injection. Any fuel that is not immediately used will be returned to the tank, and all this moving and sloshing around will add more air to the fuel. Before long, the fuel can become over-oxygenated and cause the engine to stall and/or lose power. the lift pump is intended to deal with this problem, but it doesn’t always work.
Solutions
One way to solve this problem is by adding a fuel preparator to your system, such as the Airdog from Pureflow Technologies. The Airdog fuel pressure de-oxygenator does a great job of separating fuel from air to prevent those bubbles from interfering with the normal operation of your engine. Of course, this is not the only product that can solve this problem, although Pureflow is considered to be one of the better brands.
Don’t ignore this problem, or you may quickly find yourself taking an expensive trip to the repair shop. There is a process by which you can bleed the air from the fuel yourself, but you don’t want to be forced into doing this on a regular basis. It is more time-efficient to just install a fuel preparator device.