Anyone have a Tornado

[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.