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has anyone seen those infomercials on a little metallic cylindrical thing you put in the intake which is supposed to boost HP by causing the air to flow better/faster? is this just a gimmick or what?
heh i was just thinking about that yesterday when i saw a commecial for k&m air filters. don't have the specs because i couldn't remember what it was called. i'll look for them now though.
yeah, it's completely foney-baloney... if you can think about how it's trying to do what it's claiming, you'll see why...
fluids flow best when moving in a laminar ("layered" or organized...) fashion... uh, i'll finish this later, i've gotta jet!!
yeah, i guess if something seems too good to be true it almost always is.
those infomercials can seem pretty darn convincing though. when they showed the fluid draining from one container to another and how much faster it drained once they gave it a spin, that really piqued my curiosity.
The infomercial shows two bottles joined mouth to mouth. As-is the liquid takes a while to flow from top to bottom because both water and air are trying to get through the mouth at the same time. The "tornado" device simply opens a fixed passage for air which eliminates the turbulence and allows water to flow much quicker.
What that has to do with a car engine is beyond me though.
Each cylinder has one opening for air intake and another for exhaust discharge. So much for comparing it to the bottles where only one opening is used for both.
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ah, now i can finish... anyhoo, as i was sayin' before, fluids flow fastest when moving in a lamiar fashion, as opposed to a turbulent flow... makes sense, right??
so, this device introduces planes into the airflow which interrupt this laminar flow, and cause it to "swirl" around... this "swirling" disturbs the somewhat organized flow inside the intake path, and the body of air moving through the device would soon lose its rotational momentum as it twists and turns itself through the intake system... certainly, adding some amount of turbulence throughout the entire volume of air isn't going to improve rate of flow, and that swirling motion would most likely disapate by the time it reaches the injectors... not only that, but there is generally a whole lot of swirling happenign in the combustion chamber as the fuels (air and gas) are drawn in through the port....
I think the product on the whole is a little questionable, but you may have to evaluate it on a case by case basis. With all the different intake paths on the multiple engine layouts in the marketplace it could be beneficial on some. The basic concept of making the air "swirl" will aid in fuel atomization and homogenize the mixture throughout the cylinder. This will allow more predictable and complete burning upon detonation increasing efficiency, lowering emmisions and best of all allow us to dump in more gas and make more horsepower (if you choose to do so). Without a whole lot of thought I am thinking this could be most beneficial on maybe a single cylinder two-stroke motor because there is no separate intake paths where the flow could be disrupted how Wakeech desribes. But then you can draw similarities between a two-stroke and a rotary, and now the renesis has two separate throttle bodies with two separate intake paths for each rotor. Could all of this be a bunch of crap... yeah!! But would you like to add even a few hp to your 8 for less than 50 bucks... HELL YEAH!!
In conclusion: It could very well be a scam but you can't be skeptical and dismiss the concept without exploring its possibilities.
well, as i was sayin' before, the swirl effect that this device causes nets almost no difference in how the airflow behaves as it enters the combustion chamber and is really only transferring linear momentum that the flow has toward the engine and is transforming it into "rotational" momentum as it causes the flow to swirl... that momentum would quickly die out, simply wasting that linear momentum and disturbing the somewhat laminar flow of the air...
anyhoo, back to those bottles: the deal is that that simulation is entirely different than what you have happening inside your engine... two fluids of different densities are trying to trade places, and the way in which the device was used helped them do so...
if i remember correctly (it's been months since i saw this), he had a bottle of water and a bottle of air connected to each other with the Tornado-thingy in the middle, right?? and he moved the bottles in a circular fashion to swirl the water, yes??
well, basically, he gave the water (which is obviously denser and more coherent than air) more momentum, propelling it to the "outside" of the passage between the bottles, creating a central channel through which the air can more easily flow into the top bottle... you can do the same thing when dumping a bottle of water into the sink, even with out the tornado device... just cover the bottom, swirl it around a bit, remove hand, watch as the water magically shoots out of the bottle quickly: same principle.
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