

Mercedes Benz Museum's ventilation system can form an artificial tornado - jamesjyu
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/mercedes-benz-tornado.html

======
warfangle
This is pretty neat. My beef with the article (not the demonstration):

"Or perhaps horizontal tornadoes could roll through the New York subway system
every night from 2-5am, cleaning out the underworld of its dust and potato
chip bags"

This might be nice, except some people rely on the subways between 2-5 am (it
doesn't help that most bars close at 3-4 am on the weekends). There are some
periods where the trains run every 30-45 minutes instead of the every 3-5
minutes they do during rush hour, but they always run - so there would always
be an obstruction. Subway tunnels are always blocked at some point, so this
solution wouldn't really work to clean the tunnels.

If the tunnels were round and less historic, with smooth surfaces, it would be
possible to build a robotic cleaning train. But with the current tunnels,
there are just too many hidden surfaces for this to be worthwhile.

~~~
Batsu
How about the dark twist at the end?

\-- "Or your new house in the Chicago suburbs seems absolutely perfect for you
and your family—till the first hot day of the year sets in and you turn on the
A/C. Some sinister combination of ill-conceived vents and over-tall foyer
begins to rope together winds—pulling in air from the living room, from the
basement, from the kids' bedrooms—and within a mere twenty minutes a tornado-
strength twister takes visible form.

It then spins for days, suffocating the residents in their sleep by robbing
them of oxygen, and lifting their limp bodies into the air, where they turn in
lazy circles like pirates drowned at sea. Their bodies dance aloft, as if
caught in an aero-spirograph, eerily lit by dim suburban lamplight and visible
through the front door windows—a vision of the vortex—accidentally killed by
HVAC." \--

This is why we can't have nice things.

------
terhechte
Our Software powers the media playback in that museum (www.videro.com). So
during the building phase I was able to attend one of the tests of that
tornado (since I worked on site). It was really pretty impressive.

------
jrockway
It seems that the pressure drop in the "tornado" is not large enough for a
condensation cloud to form; they have to make the tornado visible with smoke.
So this is more of a dust devil, I guess.

