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Understanding Fuel Injectors

Fuel Injectors have now totally replaced carburetors that were for many years used for fuel delivery. It is their job to deliver the fuel into the engine’s combustion chambers to be burned. Fuel injectors are part of a computerized system that sprays the fuel into the combustion chambers at regular intervals - whereas carburetors will use a vacuum to pull the fuel into the engine’s combustion chambers.

There are a few different kinds of electronic fuel injection systems:

The simplest is called the throttle-body injection. A throttle-body injector works like a computerized carburetor, with one fuel injector that will deliver fuel to all of the combustion chambers. It looks very similar to a carburetor because both are placed on top of the engine and are set up to deliver fuel to all of the cylinders.

A more advanced type is the multi-port fuel injection. This has a separate fuel injector for each cylinder. With a multi-port setup, all the fuel injectors spray fuel at the same time, even though the cylinders don’t fire at the same time.

The most advanced type of electronic fuel injection is sequential multi-port fuel injection. This will cause each injector to spray immediately before that particular injector fires. Therefore, a driver of a car with particular system will get a much quicker response when they floors the gas pedal. The reason for this is because the fuel delivery system doesn’t have to finish a whole revolution of the engine before it’s able to increase the frequency of fuel delivery.

Fuel injection is a very complicated system and it involves a lot more than just the fuel injectors. The whole system is run by computers. There are sensors that send vital information back to the computer to be processed. This then determines when the injectors will spray the fuel and how much fuel is delivered.

For instance:

The throttle position sensor will monitor where the gas pedal is positioned. The further down you push the gas pedal, the faster the engine will go. This then means that the fuel injectors must spray more frequently. The oxygen sensor monitors the levels on unburned fuel in the exhaust. If there’s too much fuel going through and it’s not being burned then the sensor will tell the computer that the engine is running too rich. This then means that the computer will tell the injectors to spray less fuel at each rotation.

Electronic fuel injection is a lot more complicated than carburetors and it requires so much more computerization, but the fuel delivery is so much more precise. Fuel injectors give cars better power and acceleration. By reprogramming the computer and increasing the fuel pressure levels it also betters the performance levels of power in your vehicle.