Fuel tank baffles.

[cjanota]

We need to put baffles in our fuel thank this year after years of not needing them. What do you guys do for baffles? I was thinking of just putting in half-height walls with small holes in them to allow for slow fuel passage. Does anyone have input on this with regards to hole size or different ways to keep the fuel pickup covered?

[cjanota]

We need to put baffles in our fuel thank this year after years of not needing them. What do you guys do for baffles? I was thinking of just putting in half-height walls with small holes in them to allow for slow fuel passage. Does anyone have input on this with regards to hole size or different ways to keep the fuel pickup covered?

[Mike Macie]

Did try using any foam in your old cell? If not, Fuel Safe sells some pretty good stuff. Only uses about 3% of the total volume. A lot easier than using baffles.

[cjanota]

I have some of that on the way but I didn't know how well it works for sustained turns versus just splash control.

[Mike Macie]

Well they use it in all of their race cells for vehicles that see higher accelerations then fsae. If it's a concern it would be easy to test(foam and baffles). Only issues i see would be complicated shape, long term use(i read stories of deterioration after years of use, might now be an issue anymore), and maybe ethanol but i think you can get foam for that too now. Either way, foam or baffles work.

[JamesWolak]

We used foam last year and still had issues. Where we had the biggest problem was the last couple laps in our endurance testing when we were low on fuel.

We kept this in mind this year and actually thought about more then packaging with the tank.

Easiest fix is to add more volume to your tank but that is a big hit in weight. Personally this late in the game i would do all three.

Foam, baffle, and add volume.

Then again matters how bad your issue is.

[Kevin Dunn]

Yeah. We had baffles laser cut with a certain height slot cut into them (calculated the flow rate required from the pump, etc).

Along with adding volume, you need to take into consideration the fuel travel during lateral acceleration. We've got a sump designed into ours to keep fuel near the pump pick-up. So in all, our tank has baffling, foam, "anti-slosh" geometry, as well as a sump. Hopefully, we see some good results from it.