Performance Chips, Vortex's, & Fuel Atomizers

uh... thumbs down... all bad products.

 

Waste of money. Want to improve performance? Take weight off the car - rims, tires, crap you carry around, maybe even sound deadening if you're really serious.

Performance chip = great if you have a different kind of car (Evo, STi, RS4/6, Corvette,etc), probably useless to lean out the A/F mixture on the Prius.

Vortex = if these things worked, wouldn't all cars have them?

Fuel Atomizer = you realize your fuel injectors are fuel atomizers? Perfume sprayers are also referred to as "atomizers"

This is representative of a normal fuel injector spray:

 

You don't want any of it. Vortex things just screw up the intake path, you aren't going to find a working performance chip for the Prius, and I haven't the faintest idea what a fuel "atomizer" would do that a fuel injector doesn't do.

 

Don't waste money on those "snake oils".
Those things sell on "placebo effect".

 

Don't forget the plastic thing you put over the front license plate to reduce its Cd! It's guaranteed !!!

 

Guaranteed to reduce the Cd from 0.26 to 0.259999.

 

Back in about 1965 Oldsmobile made a turbocharged vehicle called the F85 Jetfire. It used a fluid called "Turbo Rocket Fluid" to cool the gas/air mixture when the turbo charger was on full boost. The description today may get catcalls, but it was GM that was using it in a production vehicle. Quite where you would buy more Turbo Rocket Fluid today, I don't really know. It was probably just an alcohol/water mix.

Engines of the time used a richer gas/air mixture than we do today. The extra fuel (beyond that necessary for combustion) was used to cool the burn, thus preventing detonation. Without the cooling by extra fuel (or Turbo Rocket Fluid), the engine would have to run a lower compression, or use higher octane gas.

Lead additives to the fuel were also used to cool the burn. Removal of the lead from gasoline required the manufacturers to use higher temperature materials, particularly valves and valve seats.

Performance chips simply increase the amount of fuel in the air/fuel mixture. And/or they may change the ignition timing under full power. If you want more power from an engine, adding more fuel to the mixture is one of the techniques that work.

Vortexes are a legitimate design technique. Most of what I've heard about them has to do with the geometry of the air intake and piston in the combustion chamber.

Fuel atomizers probably made sense with carburetors, but I doubt that they would add anything to a fuel injection system. But getting the proper size fuel drops is an important design criterion.

Which all leads to the aftermarket products available today. None of this stuff is something that a home mechanic has any hope of getting positive results from. The Prius doesn't use a fixed ROM chip that determines fuel mixture. It uses firmware that is loaded into eeprom via the factory scantool. If you had the specifications for that firmware, then it could be changed via a computer download. But higher performance would most likely reduce fuel economy and increase emissions.

Alcohol injection is a viable way to cool the burn without using gasoline to do it. But do you really want to carry a gallon of Turbo Rocket Fluid and the mechanisms required to inject it? I don't know of any other generally available vehicles beyond that Olds that ever used alcohol injection. The experiment was tried, and never repeated.

 

1. My understanding is that, when cold the Prius tries to warm up the catalitic converter to reduce pollution. Some unscrupulous folks build chips to lie to the computers about how cold the engine is, so it will put more emphasis on fuel economy and less on being responsible for low emissions. This can't be good, and if caught you won't have any defense in court.

2. Tornado was useless, I suspect the new ones work 'just as well,' i.e. worthless. If Toyota could charge you $80 for a piece of bent metal they would. Sadly, like all other vendors if this crap, they would get sued out of business.

3. There may have still been carburated cars in the 1990s, none of them were Priuses and none are sold today.

Want your car to get better gas mileage? Proper maintenance.

 

The chips and ECU programmers can be real (though there are junk ones too). Most of them trade off fuel economy and emissions for more power though some will trade off power and emissions for more mpg. Some are flexable (like mine) and I have mine set for max mpg. There are ones that can allow you to set the engine in such a way you can damage it by operating it out of range.

https://www.superchips.com/default.aspx#pn=OnlineStore&vsc=true&vfid=736

 

MotorWeek: Auto Basics: Goss' Garage I think covers the "vortex" product.

 

Quite right - it was water and alcohol, with, as I recall, a bit of food coloring. The car was the "Rocketfire" or a Jetfire with a Turbo. It was also a 2-door hardtop, while the Jetfire was a 2-door sedan.

GM had come out with turbocharging on the Corvair the year before, but that engine ran lower compression than the naturally-aspirated version. The Olds ran full compression, requiring the alcohol injection. An intercooler would have worked better, but this was the dawn of factory mass-produced turbocharging. Intercoolers had been around since the 'teens, but the cost and plumbing issues were deemed to be not worth the trouble for Olds.

I owned a '65 Corvair Turbo and two friends have owned the Rocketfire. Very crude devices, those early installations, with a lot of turbo lag. But it was still a lot of fun! I later owned a Renault Fuego Turbo, a Shelby CSX turbo, a Talon turbo, a Chrysler LeBaron GTS turbo, and a Volkswagen New Beetle Turbo S. I turbocharged a Cobalt SS 2.4 (which was the naturally aspirated version of the SS). I'd love to see the Prius turbocharged with a tiny RKK or Hitachi unit. They tend to give even better economy while increasing the torque significantly, even with low boost.

 

I'm amazed those juicedhybrid shysters are still in business.
.
_H*

 

Ultimately, there's no free lunch. All car designs are a compromise between economy, performance, and emissions. All the gizmos that actually do something tinker with this compromise. (The ones that claim to improve all three are nothing but snake oil.)

The Prius design obviously stresses the emissions and economy at the expense of performance. If you get better performance, you'll have worse MPG and emissions.

 

While the vortex is snake oil, there is some desirable level of turbulence entering the combustion chamber. My 240 had swirl control valves that disturbed the flow at low throttle openings/low rpm to improve driveabilty/smoothness. Of course these were problematic in that when open at higher rpm they still seemed to restrict the intake. It wasn't noticeable in stock form, but once the ECU was reprogrammed, and the filter body streamlined with an airhorn the bottleneck appeared. It created a honking effect at around 5,000 rpm and WOT in warm weather (summer in Texas) and power plateaued early. I wanted to try pulling the swirl valves out and have some work done to the intake manifold, but never got around to it.

 

Hi Shawn,

One of the basic Engine Design problems is known as the "Hot Rodder" problem. This is what happens to car engines with big valves. They idle very poor and even stall, and are hard to start. With 4 port heads, allot of this problem has been controlled.

I imagine on your 240, the swirl devices were there to get good flow at low engine speeds, and keep the car running. Did that car have 2 intake values or 1 per cylinder ?

 

Japanese bike manufacturers have done an incredible amount of work on intake flow. Many of the superbike heads have the strangest bumps in the intake ports. Taking them out and doing the old port and polish often will reduce performance over the entire range. For one thing, some swirl is a Good Thing. For another, it turns out that to achieve the best laminar flow against the port wall it is best for it to be slightly "grainy" instead of polished.

 

DOHC, 2 intake, 2 exhaust per cylinder. Same bore and stroke as the Ford V-8 Mustangs at the time...but lighter car, small profile, slippery aero, better handling, better ignition, and some minor mods had the 4 banger running even with them, beating many. Most fun I had was running against one of the Cobra Mustangs through the twisties and straights. He had a lot more torque and could pull away in the straights, but I could plunge a lot harder into the turns and pass him every time. Since I could control the key turns with him stuck behind me, I finished first.

 

A story about an S13 (?) worthy of Inital D
The 240SX had a KA24DE engine in the US - I heard it was borrowed from a truck (!). Too bad you didn't have a SR20DET swap, the Mustang wouldn't have had a chance

 

Some useful information from an engine designer at Fuel saving - a professional engineer's view

"Chipping"
Turbulence Generators
Atomisers/Vaporisers