The Breakdown: Indoor Tornado

By Gregory Mone Posted 10.31.2007 at 4:00 pm 1 Comment

Apparently classic cars aren't enough of a draw anymore. The Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany turned its smoke ventilation system into a spectacle, generating what the Guinness World Records organization is calling the world's largest artificial tornado. (See the November issue of Popular Science for an article about an engineer who thinks these man-made vortexes could be used to generate electricity.)

Though towering, the twister probably isn't dangerous. It's not going to suck up any bystanders, or cars. To create the effect, the museum's designers set up a disco smoke machine, then activated a set of 144 nozzles on the ceiling of the building's enormous atrium. The ventilation system, designed for emergencies, sucks the disco smoke up from below. To produce a spinning vortex, however, they blew air in from the sides, forcing the smoke to swirl.

The process took seven minutes, but the result, seen here, certainly looks capable of drawing crowds. Or making them run for their lives.—Gregory Mone

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11/02/07 at 5:23 pm

The car show tornado is not nearly as spectacular as one produced here in Los Angeles (San Fernando valley, to be specific). In a giant warehouse, a sky crane helicopter blade was spun using a large gasoline engine, about 500 hp. as I remember. It created an enormous twister, with real power. It was used for shots in the movie called "Twister". It could even have "addditives" (smoke, fire, etc) to make the vortex more dramatic.

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