Anyone have a Tornado

[88GT 5pt0]

Does anyone have the tornado fuel saver on their car? This infomercial is pursueding but I dunno, 20hp for 60 bucks? Sounds too good to be true. Does it at least help on gas milage? This V8 is killin me.

[silver_pilate]

Sorry. It's not going to help.

The Tornado widget is suppose to create a vortex within the intake air stream, which supposedly helps with fuel atomization, thus increasing power and fuel economy. There are several reasons that I don't see this working.

For one, I doubt if it has any significant effect on creating a vortex within the air stream. Most likely I just see it causing more turbulence and decreasing the efficiency of your air charge. Also, if it did somehow create a vortex of sorts, that vortex still has to travel through the throttle body, throttle blade, and intake into the plenum, magically split into eight different mini-vortecies, and sustain itself through several fairly extreme bends before it sees any fuel. And then it undergoes the trauma of traveling through the valves into the chamber.... Yeah. I don't think so.

Anyway, 20 hp? Hades no. The only beneficial effect I see it having would be similar to a throttle body or intake spacer.

--nathan

[Old Guy with 87 GT]

i think them things might help in certian applications ,but not on a modern porformance engine

now a days most cars have a factory intake designed to put a swirl or spin on it's intake charge on it's own .......like it was said above it think on a modern intake it would just add more turbulance then neccesary

plus if it really made a substancial power increase then you wuold hear more storys of unbiased testimonials from peaple ........peaple in the performance world will try anything ,.....and if it works you'll hear about it

[jimberg]

The thing is a complete fraud. If anything, it would restrict your air flow. I'd be more than happy to take a check from you for $60 so I can tell you that you have 20 more horsepower. In fact, I'll do it for a mere $10.

The things they say and do in the infomercial are the most telling. First, they compare it to the technology used in Turbo Fan engines. That was BS, of course, since the turbines in a Turbo Fan engine are not passively causing the air to spin. A turbocharger is much more comparable.

Then they did an experiment where they have two two-liter bottles strapped together with one of the bottles filled with water. They turned it over like an hour glass and the water just glugged slowly from the top bottle to the lower bottle. Then, when they swirled it, the water magically flowed freely from one bottle to the next. This only demonstrated that you need to be able to replace the volume of water that left one bottle with air. The vortex they created in the liquid created a hole to allow air to pass through freely which allowed the water to flow through freely. Liquids are not compressable, but gases are, so there really isn't much of a comparison.

Another experiment is where they have a vane inside a plastic container with air being pulled through. The van is just pulsating back and forth at the turbulent air moved past it. Then they put a Tornado gismo on the opening and magically the vane starts spinning. They implied that the air was moving through faster, but in reality, the vane was only spinning since they did create a vortex. The vane may have spun faster, but it wasn't a measure of how fast the air was originally moving. The air velocity most likely decreased because of the obstruction.

Oh, and they did that test with the car on the dyno. They added the Tornado and it got more horsepower. That IS possible if the car was already running too lean. The tornado could restrict the air flow causing the A/F ratio to richen up and produce a little extra HP. It would eventually go back to what it was or even worse because of the computer compensating for the lack of airflow.

It's almost as bad as those people selling bilge fans as a poor man's supercharger on eBay.

[GhettoPop]

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