New cars are confusing. With all the computers, sensors, and gadgets, it may seem like theres Read more Read. Back in the day, a good ol carburetor was responsible for sending the appropriate amount of fuel into the cylinders. Today, that job belongs to the ECU. New cars are confusing. With all the computers, sensors, and gadgets, it may seem like theres Read more Read. Lets see how it works. For a lot of you this is review, but if we want a new generation of car enthusiasts to care about cars, it cant hurt to explain how they actually work. ELECTRONIC FUEL INJECTIONPhoto Credit Albertas Agejevas. If the heart of a car is its engine, then its brain must be the Engine Control Unit ECU. Also known as a Powertrain Control Module PCM, the ECU optimizes engine performance by using sensors to decide how to control certain actuators in an engine. How Does An Injector Driver Work ShirtsA cars ECU is primarily responsible for four tasks. Firstly, the ECU controls the fuel mixture. Secondly, the ECU controls idle speed. Thirdly, the ECU is responsible for ignition timing. Lastly, in some applications, the ECU controls valve timing. Before we talk about how the ECU accomplishes its tasks, lets follow the path of a gasoline droplet that enters your gas tank. Times have changed since the Down the Gasoline Trailvideo, so its time for an update. Initially, after a gas droplet enters your gas tank which is now made of plastic, it gets sucked up by an electric fuel pump. The electric fuel pump usually comes in an in tank module that consists of a pump, a filter, and a sending unit. The sending unit uses a voltage divider to tell your gas gauge how much fuel you have left in your tank. The pump sends the gasoline through a fuel filter, through hard fuel lines, and into a fuel rail. New cars are confusing. With all the computers, sensors, and gadgets, it may seem like theres Read more Read. A vacuum powered fuel pressure regulator at the end of the fuel rail ensures that the fuel pressure in the rail remains constant relative to the intake pressure. For a gasoline engine, fuel pressure is usually on the order of 3. Fuel injectors connect to the rail, but their valves remain closed until the ECU decides to send fuel into the cylinders. Purple3/v4/f0/55/b5/f055b5bd-2ef8-6144-314d-1997f80aed95/screen480x480.jpeg' alt='How Does An Injector Driver Work Wanted' title='How Does An Injector Driver Work Wanted' />Usually, the injectors have two pins. One pin is connected to the battery through the ignition relay and the other pin goes to the ECU. The ECU sends a pulsing ground to the injector, which closes the circuit, providing the injectors solenoid with current. The magnet on top of the plunger is attracted to the solenoids magnetic field, opening the valve. Since there is high pressure in the rail, opening the valve sends fuel at a high velocity through the injectors spray tip. The duration that the valve is open and consequently the amount of fuel sent into the cylinder depends on the pulse width i. ECU sends the ground signal to the injector. When the plunger rises, it opens a valve and the injector sends fuel through the spray tip and into either the intake manifold, just upstream of the intake valve, or directly into the cylinder. Gasoline vapor deposits left in fuel injector nozzles after an engine is shut down form hard varnish. Over time, it can build up and clog the injectors. The TD5 engine has for its time a modern electronic injector system where the injectors are fitted inside the engine and the fuel supply to them comes. This is the second test for Gumout All in One fuel cleaner to see if it actually removes carbon deposits. I use a mini borescope camera to look into the. Automotive Service Professional is a website, eNewsletter and magazine dedicated to providing auto service technicians with practical howto articles for firstfix. Trouble Code Fault Location Probable Cause P062D Fuel Injector Driver Circuit Performance Wiring, Defective fuel injector injector circuit or software, PCM. It works with all graphics cards as long as they support at least shader model 3. Thats all cards produced after 2002 give or take. It does not work with 64bit. The former system is called multiport fuel injection and the latter is direct injection. Diagram from Wikipedia. Controlling Fuel Mixture. Weve already looked at how electronic throttle control works. We showed you that, when a driver pushes his or her gas pedal, an accelerator pedal position sensor APP sends a signal to the ECU, which then commands the throttle to open. The ECU takes information from the throttle position sensor and APP until the throttle has reached the desired position set by the driver. But what happens next Either a mass air flow sensor MAF or a Manifold Absolute Pressor Sensor MAP determines how much air is entering the throttle body and sends the information to the ECU. The ECU uses the information to decide how much fuel to inject into the cylinders to keep the mixture stoichiometric. About Fuel Injectors Injector Cleaning. How does fuel injection work The function of a fuel injector Types of injector How injector cleaning works. MegaManual Index Injector Selection Pulse Width Modulation The Flyback Board Injector Resistors Injector Bungs and Fuel Rails Throttle BodiesFuel Supply. The computer continually uses the TPS to check the throttles position and the MAF or MAP sensor to check how much air is flowing through the intake in order to adjust the pulse sent to the injectors, ensuring that the appropriate amount of fuel gets injected into the incoming air. In addition, the ECU uses the o. The oxygen content in the exhaust provides an indication of how well the fuel is burning. Between the MAF sensors and the 0. Controlling Idle. Photo Credit Aidan. Lets talk about idling. How Does An Injector Driver Work JobsIf you wish to have the nozzles calibrated and tested, kermatdi does this service. They will also do an injector hot swap with a deposit so there is no downtime. Most early fuel injected vehicles utilized a solenoid based idle air control valve IAC to vary air flow into the engine during idle see the white plug in the above image. Controlled by the ECU, the IAC bypasses the throttle valve and allows the computer to ensure smooth idle when the driver does not activate the accelerator pedal. The IAC is similar to a fuel injector in that they both alter fluid flow via a solenoid actuated pin. Most new cars dont have IAC valves. With older cable controlled throttles, the air entering the engine during idle had to go around the throttle plate. Today, thats not that case, as Electronic Throttle Control systems allow the ECU to open and close the butterfly valve via a stepper motor. The ECU monitors the rotational speed of the engine via a crankshaft position sensor, which is commonly a Hall Effect sensor or optical sensor that reads the rotational speed of the crank pulley, engine flywheel, or the crankshaft itself. The ECU sends fuel to the engine based upon how fast the crankshaft rotates, which is directly related to the load on the engine. Lets say you turn on your air conditioning or shift your vehicle into drive. The speed of your crankshaft will decrease below the threshold speed set by the ECU due to the added load. The crankshaft position sensor will communicate this decreased engine speed to the ECU, which will then open the throttle more and send longer pulses to the injectors, adding more fuel to compensate for the increased engine load. This is the beauty of feedback control. Why does your engine rev higher at startupWhen you initially turn on the vehicle, the ECU checks the engine temperature via a coolant temperature sensor. If it notices that the engine is cold, it sets a higher idle threshold to warm the engine up. Controlling Ignition Timing. Photo Credit AJ Hill. Now that weve mentioned the ECUs tasks of maintaining engine idle speed, as well as maintaining a proper airfuel mixture, lets talk about ignition timing. To achieve optimum operation, the spark plug must be provided with current at very precise moments, usually about 1. The exact moment that the spark plug fires relative to the pistons position is optimized to facilitate the development of peak pressure. This allows the engine to recover a maximum amount of work from the expanding gas. Older engines up until the mid 2. Shown above, this system consists of a rotor and a distributor cap. The rotor is electrically connected to the ignition coil, which is basically a transformer that steps 1. The rotor is mechanically connected to the camshaft via a gear. As the camshaft spins, so does the rotor. As the rotor spins, it comes very close to copper posts one for each cylinder.