'Tornado in a can' pulverizes materials

CLINTON, N.C. — Inside the corrugated tin shed that serves as the top-secret test site for Vortex Dehydration Technology's strange new invention, Frank Polifka cranks open a valve and unleashes the force of a tornado. Compressed air rushes into an 8-foot-tall steel cone and whirls counterclockwise at tremendous speeds, producing winds capable of turning rock into dust.

There's a parade of visitors coming from all over the country to see this machine, to witness for themselves whether it really does what they've heard it can do. They want to know whether it really offers a new technology for mining precious metals, pulverizing trash, grinding concrete into a powder that can be reconstituted with water.

But the keenest interest so far is from poultry people who are watching closely to see whether it can revolutionize the way billions of pounds of chicken byproducts — the feet, feathers, heads and entrails that don't end up in the supermarket — are processed.

Polifka, 73, calls his creation a "tornado in a can," though the official name painted on the side of the cone is Windhexe — a branding inspired by the devil winds that sweep the Kansas plains that he has farmed all his life.

Whether there are riches to be made from pulverizing poultry parts into powder remains to be seen. The trick will be whether the machine can transform the various substances into products worth more than the processing costs.

Several of the poultry companies were impressed enough to donate equipment and share information with Vortex. Though poultry officials are reluctant to speak publicly about the Windhexe for competitive reasons, they say the technology is intriguing.

"It kind of looks like something your uncle might invent in the back yard," said one poultry company executive. "But it really sparks the imagination what you could do with it."

Some day, this machine could make a fortune for Polifka and his partners. But at the moment, it is emitting a knee-buckling shriek. Engineers shut it down and huddle, mulling over a complex mathematical solution they think might help them fix the noise.

But Polifka, a stocky man with a snow-white beard and twinkling eyes, just opens the machine, grabs a broom handle and pokes at a flap of metal inside the cone. The adjustment made, he shuts the machine and starts it again. The noise is gone. In its place is the powerful hum of air, contained in the 6-foot-diameter funnel Polifka modeled after the tornadoes he watched while growing up.

The tornado in a can is back up and ready for business.

Over the next several days, Polifka and his partners will test the Windhexe on a variety of substances.

A ton of chicken backs. Four industrial-size drums containing 2,000 pounds of broken eggshells. A pallet of household garbage.

And eight buckets of jellyfish caught in the Gulf of Mexico just a few days earlier by a scientist who believes the machine can spin them into the pharmaceutical equivalent of gold.

Polifka turns a wheel that controls the flow of air into the Windhexe and climbs up to where engineer Whit Davis prepares to feed the machine. Davis scoops up a handful of jellyfish goo and drops it in.

The machine cranks louder as the goo hits the vortex, and the mysterious process inside begins.

Each year, the U.S. poultry industry generates about 4 million tons of feathers, heads, feet and entrails. An additional 50,000 tons of dissolved solids such as fat are skimmed from the wastewater stream, much of it sprayed on farm fields as fertilizer. And much of the 300 million tons of shells produced by laying hens each year is worked into the soil.

But with environmental laws making land disposal more difficult in some areas, poultry companies have sought new ways of handling that waste.

Enter the tornado in a can.

"The single most important quality of the tornado in a can is whatever goes into it comes out with its nutritional value," said David Winsness, a distributor of material-handling equipment to such poultry giants as Perdue and Tyson Foods. "You can get four times the price of nonedible waste."

Last month, Polifka received a patent on the Windhexe. And word of it has spread worldwide.

Could it dry out huge stores of underground coal, an Australian company has asked, and make it a viable alternative to oil? Would it dehydrate duck manure, some farmers in Ireland wondered. Could it separate gold from sand and gravel, asked another company, thinking this could be a new way to squeeze greater profits from the ground.

You bet, its champions say, the possibilities are endless. To test their theory, the Vortex folks have thrown in rocks, diapers, tomatoes, sweet-potato rejects from the farm down the road, 400 pounds of Oreo cookies, frozen pizza dough, even a dead bird.

The jellyfish, however, are a first.

When Polifka switches on the huge compressor that sits outside the testing shed, the lights inside dim as the huge motor starts sucking air into the tank, enough to fill 50 tires a second.

Polifka cranks up the temperature in the cone as the vortex roars, and the superheated spiral of air evaporates the water in the jellyfish and bludgeons the remains into powder.

Within seconds, a fine white powder starts dropping from the opening at the bottom of the cone into a wheelbarrow parked beneath.