I’ve read online on how airliners store their fuel in the wings of the plane, and especially how it’s not in a tank, but its just inside the wings.
How exactly does this work? Does this mean the wings have to be completely air tight? If the inside of the wings are mostly structural elements, how do they deliver the fuel while making sure that there aren’t areas in the wing structure where the fuel gets trapped?
In: Engineering
I might try looking at the [Wikipedia page for this topic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_wing), I think it answers your question fairly well.
First sentence of the article:
>A wet wing is an aerospace engineering technique where an aircraft’s wing structure is sealed and used as a fuel tank. Wet wings are also called integral fuel tanks.[1]
>A disadvantage of the wet wing is that every rivet, bolt, nut plate, hose and tube that penetrates the wing must be sealed to prevent fuel from leaking or seeping around these hardware components. This sealant must allow for expansion and contraction due to rapid temperature changes (such as when cold fuel is pumped into a warm wing tank) and must retain its sealing properties when submerged in fuel and when left dry for long periods of time.
There’s also this [Quora thread](https://www.quora.com/How-do-the-wings-of-an-aircraft-store-fuel) that I found. The answer by Jayaprakash has a pretty cool picture of a tank-like object taking up almost the entire cross-section of the wing.
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