The Tornado
Here's a quote from an email I worte to a co-worker regarding the tornado:
The turbonator or tornado is pure snake oil. It is nothing more than a power robbing intake restriction on modern cars. While twister type carburetor plates did work on old school engines running carbs, they wont correctly with modern fuel injection and intake manifolds. The intake manifolds reuire air to be smooth and laminar in order to keep airflow uniform to each cylinder. Once through the intake manifold, most modern heads have an intake port runner with a built in “swirl ramp” which effectively does what the turbonator can only attempt to do. Modern engine design also uses a “quench pad” which is a portion of the combustion chamber (usually one side) where the piston comes within a few thousandths (.050 or so) to the bottom of the head. This squish space forces the air out from the crevice sideways to create a mixing vortex inside the combustion chamber during the compression stroke, creating a more homogenized air fuel mixture, which burns better and requires less spark advance for the same quality flame front during the burn. This results in more power and less emissions. Spinning the intake air way before it even gets to the intake runners or into the cylinder does nil compared to the mixing force created by the quench pad.
The turbonator or tornado is pure snake oil. It is nothing more than a power robbing intake restriction on modern cars. While twister type carburetor plates did work on old school engines running carbs, they wont correctly with modern fuel injection and intake manifolds. The intake manifolds reuire air to be smooth and laminar in order to keep airflow uniform to each cylinder. Once through the intake manifold, most modern heads have an intake port runner with a built in “swirl ramp” which effectively does what the turbonator can only attempt to do. Modern engine design also uses a “quench pad” which is a portion of the combustion chamber (usually one side) where the piston comes within a few thousandths (.050 or so) to the bottom of the head. This squish space forces the air out from the crevice sideways to create a mixing vortex inside the combustion chamber during the compression stroke, creating a more homogenized air fuel mixture, which burns better and requires less spark advance for the same quality flame front during the burn. This results in more power and less emissions. Spinning the intake air way before it even gets to the intake runners or into the cylinder does nil compared to the mixing force created by the quench pad.
