Yes - I looked. Kind of expected to see another snakeoil post, yet was somewhat interested at the same time from a historical point of view. Without people looking at things differently, and trying out strange concepts, we probably would never make any progress forward. Let's go back in time a bit. In 1908, a Grand Prix car had a four seat touring body, could accelerate from 0 to 60 in 16 seconds, and did it with a 12 litre engine that weighed more than half a ton. Intake systems were quite crude at that time as they were considered to be merely a way to get the fuel and air mixture to the combustion chamber and nothing more. Time was not wasted on designing the induction system. Here is where the concept of tornados came into play. Today it is known that any induction system is a compromise between the conflicting requirements of providing a smooth path for the airflow so that we may achieve a high volumetric efficiency, and providing a degree of turbulence so that the fuel will remain properly in suspension without having richer or weaker streams. In the 1920's, The Cletrac Tractor Co. developed and marketed a system that dramatically improved the combustion process of several of their tractors. You guessed it. It was a device that created a cyclone action within the induction system. Granted, the HP-hrs per pound of fuel was only increased from God awful to just awful, but nevertheless, it was an improvement. Twenty years later, John Deere figured the same thing out by putting a simple brow in the way of the fuel-air mixture to cause turbulence, and they too improved their engine's performance to where they had a distinct advantage over some of their competitors. The same trends were occuring within every industry that used an internal combustion engine as a source of power. No, the cyclone does not really rate very high in the now complex world where intake manifold temperatures are precisely controlled, attenuations of single and multiple induction pulse reflections are precisely plotted, and adiabatic expansion curves are defined for every internal movement of the engine. However, at the time, which really was not that long ago, the concept of a tornado was at the leading edge of technology. That is why I looked!
