CiES Fuel Sender - In the News - March 2014 Aviation Consumer

In the March 2014 Issue of Aviation Consumer the CiES Cirrus Fuel System Retrofit is reviewed.

As we have talked about in previous blog posts - Cirrus G1 / G2 retrofits are a challenge.  The results and review were favorable and represent what can be obtained on the early series aircraft.   Later model Cirrus G3's can achieve nearly perfect results.

Please look to 

aviationconsumer.com

for more information and other informative articles

CiES Inc Update

If we reflect on the past year we have accomplished quite a bit

• Secured a OEM contract on the most produced General Aviation Aircraft  - Cirrus SR20 & SR22.

• Obtained a TSO for producing this fuel level sender applicable to all aircraft.

• Received retrofit approval to install our TSO sender on all legacy Cirrus Aircraft. 

• Designed an LPG (propane) level sensor with iPhone/iPad interface

• Initiated OEM installation on the Gippsland GA-10 Turboprop, Discovery 201 & Vulcanair P68 Aircraft series.
  
  

• Achieved aircraft industry recognition for our accomplishments

What is now happening behind the scenes is truly impressive 

• Engaged in engineering design with several manufacturers for installation of our fuel level sensors on their aircraft platforms.

• Working three new aircraft platforms 

• Involved in several STC retrofit applications 

• Finalizing the boat level sensor to display at a major customer

• Engineering new aircraft systems and interfaces using our technology

• Planning for exposure in non aviation markets 

So we have been quite busy and very active - and look forward to next opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities

Resistance is Futile

When you are talking about Fuel Level.  

When we designed our new digital fuel level sender we gave a lot  of thought on how to interface with older aircraft systems.

The question was:

Could we produce an resistance output to mimic an existing resistance fuel level reporting system.  

There would be a few clear benefits:

• We could interface with many more legacy aircraft 
• Incorporation of our system in aircraft already using resistance based sending would be easier.

However some of the issues of legacy aircraft were directly related to relaying resistance through the aircraft wiring as issues with resistance can provide false or error prone signals.   Resistance measurement on an aircraft was identified by us early on in the design process as not the most favorable method for accurate fuel measurement:

• Aircraft have long wiring runs
• There are multiple sensors and connections
• The connections needed to be ordered to produce a series for multiple sensors
• There were other connections in the aircraft - bad connections produced resistance 
• There were multitudes of different resistance values even for the same aircraft
• There were amplifiers in some aircraft to address the issues above
• The wire run was subject to aircraft vibration 
• The gauge quality and accuracy in legacy aircraft was - not ideal

The favorable aspect of resistive gauging was that it was easy for the average mechanic to diagnose.

• All they needed was an Ohmmeter.

• We had heard stories of Cessna 210 Centurion and Cessna Twin Aircraft with the dreaded Cessna breakout box to tune and diagnose the capacitive system.

So what we needed was a simple digital signal that could be read with the modern equivalent of a ohmmeter  - the Digital MultiMeter (DMM).  We can now get a digital frequency output of any connected sender.

We found that Digital Frequency gave us clarity for fuel level information over all the known wiring challenges - corroded contacts, poor splices and induced signals.  More importantly it gave us a good signal or nothing - induced errors did not conspire to give bad fuel level.

What seemed more natural is that the signal was similar to that used by the fuel flow transducer.  It seemed a natural  - and we could read the read and diagnose the signal on a DMM.

When we sat down after months of delivering a fuel level sending product that had zero issues and was easy to diagnose.  ---

We had come to  realized that we had found the best method for reporting fuel level on the aircraft and a communication standard for any application we applied our product to

Customer Feedback - Cirrus Retrofit

Folks I just picked up the plane this evening from Advanced Aviation in Lancaster PA.

Joel Glover and his team did an outstanding job installing the new CIES digital fuel sensors despite a steep learning curve on this first ever install.

The next one (an SR 20 was already in the shop) should go a lot faster as the first is always the hardest.

I had a chance to run the system through its paces on the short hop from KNLS to KMMU this evening.  I must say my first impression is WOW !  A huge improvement.

I love having the fuel flow quantity on the MFD now, but the icing on the cake is the redundancy with the new digital fuel guage that replaces the former analog version.

Really cool looking, but more important is the functionality.  I really like how you can flip between fuel quantity and the fuel burn graph, really helpful for fuel balance. 

The CIES team even made sure it dims with the instrument dimmer.

I will get some more time this weekend (during the daylight) to run it through its paces, but 

I would HIGHLY recommend this a must have upgrade to your Cirrus.

Get in line now and place your orders, I am convinced you will not regret it.

If you want to eliminate all your fuel level issues, this is the only way to go.

Like you I highly recommend Advanced Aviation in Lancaster PA as the place to get it done.  Joel and his team are the defacto experts now for this upgrade.