Car or Truck Solenoid Valves What Are They Lets Look Inside

Oh, hey. I didn't see you there. In this video, we're gonna talk about solenoid valves. So, what are solenoid valves? They're actually valves that are mechanical that are controlled with electricity. Now, your vehicle has many different solenoid valves to do different jobs. This happens to be an EVAP purge solenoid. What this valve does is it controls the amount of vacuum from the intake manifold into the fuel tank. Here we have a VVT solenoid. Now, this is going to change the cam timing so that you get better horsepower and better fuel mileage. How this works, is it controls oil pressure to a actuator on the cam itself, and it can change the rotation of that. And then last and the most common solenoid valve in your vehicle is your fuel injector. Now, this works a little bit different than the others, but it does the same thing. So, this along with the other fuel injectors in your vehicle are going to work the same, you're gonna have fuel pressure coming into this side, you're going to have your electrical connection right there where it's going to pulse the electricity, and then it's going to open and close a valve, and that's going to allow fuel to enter the engine.

For the most part, these are all very similar, so let's show you how this works. This is all rigged up. Now, we have our injector here, we have a wire going for negative and positive, we have a battery, and we have some fluid. This just happens to be soapy water, but it doesn't really matter. So, now if I put the electricity on the other end of the battery, the water will go through. That opens up the valve. Just like that. So, when your car's doing this, obviously, there's pressurized fuel. And it's going to be doing this very fast. You can hear the clicking. If you opened up your hood while your engine is running, you're going to hear those injectors clicking. Now, obviously, there's no pressure in this, but if I squeeze the bottle, that's more what it would look like. So, now you have a good idea of what these do. Let's cut this open and see what's inside. So, let's pull this apart. And we have a plunger or a piston, and this is the actual valve that's going to shut off the flow of liquid, or gas, or whatever you're trying to shut off. And then normally, there is a spring that's going to push that down. And then you have an electromagnet, so you basically have these two wires in here with coils of wire wrapping around here. And how that works is when the plunger is in there and you connect the two wires, and you add power to it, it is gonna bring up the plunger or the piston. Just like that. And that's how most of these work.

And that is how all of these work. Even though one's a fuel injector, one's the VVT solenoid or even the purge valve, they're all going to do the same thing. So, I took this apart even more so you could see how it works. So, we have the coils, the coil windings and that's where the electromagnet comes into play, then the piston, which you saw. And then on this VVT solenoid, you can see where the oil goes and where the valve gets changed. When that piston moves back and forth, it's going to change the direction or the flow of the oil pressure. So, that's a pretty cool view of how solenoid valves work. So, if you needed to open and close something electronically, you can use a solenoid valve. If you enjoyed this video and it helped you out, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.