In this article, we will be explaining the Fuel Tank Manager App.
The structure will be the following:
Introduction
The Fuel Tank Manager App, allows you to track the levels of your fuel tanks while calculating its consumption. This app is available from the Apps Market and its main screen is in the Account Settings.
Nomenclature
To use this app, it's important to first talk about the different tanks and fuels available:
Tank types
A tank is a place where we store fuel. Those can have different geometries, depending on each tank type you will need to enter different information to the platform:
Cylinder: you'll need to enter the diameter (cm) and capacity (L) of the tank.
Parallelepiped: the fields to fill are the height (cm), width (cm) and length (cm).
Generic: if the tank geometry isn't any of the mentioned above, you can use the generic type, where you won't need to enter any dimensions.
Fuel types
The fuel type is a material. This can depend on different variables. Our platform accepts the following fuels:
Diesel (432): It's a liquid fossil fuel. You can use this fuel type considering its unit of measure is L and a coefficient ρ of 1 kg/l.
Heavy fuel oil (509): It's a liquid fossil fuel. You can use this fuel type considering its unit of measure is kg and a coefficient ρ of 0,919 kg/l.
Pellets (468): It's a solid biofuel. You can use this fuel type considering its unit of measure is kg and a coefficient ρ of 0,650 kg/l.
Woodchip (469): It's a solid biofuel. You can use this fuel type considering its unit of measure is m³ and a coefficient ρ of 0,001 kg/l.
Requirements
To be able to install and use this app, you must have Superadmin or Admin permissions. As well as the app downloaded on an active account.
How does it work?
Once you've downloaded the app, you'll see a new section on the Account Settings, just like the screenshot below:
Then follow the next steps:
To create a new tank, all you have to do is click on "New Tank". Fill in the tank name (this will be the name of the device created), as well as the tank type, and the fuel type. Depending on the tank type you'll need to also fill in some dimensions, once you're done, you can click on "Save".
When doing this, a new data source named fuel-tank-datasource-1234 will be created with three devices:
Tank - 1: stores the fuel height as well as the data for consumption.
Tank - 2: stores the data for supply and the water height.
Tank - 3: stores the amount of fuel in the tank. This value is calculated as we will explain in the following section.
All in all, you'll need two parameters for the devices 1 and 2, and one parameter for the device 3.
NOTE: The devices are automatically accepted.
Place the devices in a location to be able to visualise the data.
Now you've created your tank! Let's go through the different options available for sending data.
Start sending data
You can send data using three different formats:
Remember that depending on the fuel type you're working from, the parameter ID will change.
Manually
When displaying the Fuel Tank Manager App through the Settings configuration, you'll visualise all the created tanks. On the left side of each tank, you'll find three icons, a plus sign, a circle arrow and a trash.
With the trash you can delete the tank (all the devices will be deleted from the data source).
You can use the circle arrow to recalculate the values of the fuel volume if you've modified the values.
Lastly, the plus sign will let you insert values to the tank with an easy and intuitive display.
If we select the plus sign, a pop-up will appear:
As you can see, we have two types of data, the readings and the supply. Depending on the fuel type and fuel tank selected, you'll have to introduce different data, the shown above is for the Generic tank with Diesel.
The readings values should be the consumed fuel, in the parallelepiped and Cylinder tank, we ask you to enter the Total height and the water height, and we will calculate the consumption values.
For the supply values, we will always ask how much fuel are you filling the tank with, so the unit used will vary depending on the fuel type.
Via API
We explain how to send readings using this option in this article.
Via Excel
We explain how to send readings using this option in this article.
How does it calculate the consumption?
To understand what's behind the values, first we'll explain the heights we are entering in the tank. We've already mentioned that when entering data, we need the water height and the fuel height. It's important to take into account the amount of water as it can have a direct impact on the efficiency and therefore on the fuel consumption and supply.
As the density of the water is higher than any of the fuels, we know the water will always lie at the bottom of the tank, and the fuel will be above it like in the following illustration:
The app automatically translates the heights into the units of each fuel option, though the procedure is the same for all. The parameters are the ones mentioned in each tank type.
For a Cylinder tank
Considering r is the radius of the tank (D/2), the c1 variable is the tank capacity/π. The fuel volume is calculated using the following formula:
For a parallelepiped tank
When working with a parallelepiped tank, the formula we work with is the following:
Visualisation
To visualise the evolution of the consumption and tank level, you can use the "New Analysis" function, selecting the parameters and devices desired. In order to recognise better which device has each data, you can change the name of the devices once you've created the tank, as we've done in the example below.
To keep in mind
The recalculation action, has a maximum period of three months period.
This app is a new version of the Fuel Tank Manager, which had the main screen in Analyse. This version has the main screen in Settings.
This app let's upload the relative readings before the fuel supplies, therefore allowing negative values for consumption. In this cases, you might need to recalculate.