There is no magical ingredient that can be added to potassium soap that is made for truck washing to transform into the best pre-soak ever used for touch-less automatic wash.
Potassium hydroxide is caustic potash or strong base.
I know a person in Vegas who uses potash to make biodiesel from the triglycerides in the waste oil from restaurant operations.
Doctors will use a 10% aqueous solution of potassium hydroxide to help decompose human skin. Weaker solutions are used to sanitize areas after surgery (i.e. removal of lesions, biopsy).
Since potassium hydroxide causes saponification of fats, it’s used to make potassium soaps which are softer than sodium hydroxide-derived soaps. Soft soaps require less water to liquefy and can contain more cleaning agent than liquefied sodium soaps.
The purpose of a buffer solution is to keep the pH at a constant level as strong acid or base is added to it.
So if the truck wash soap (Tornado) is designed to have a pH of 12.5 or 13.0, this is going to be the pH of the solution in application or nearly the same pH if a strong acid or base is added to it.
Regardless of the machine, touch-less cleaning process is much harder on vehicle surfaces than friction or waterless cleaning.
Touch-less uses about twice the amount of chemical as compared to friction. No doubt Tornado “cleans” cars well with water wizard or whatever but strong base strips wax.
Paint damage from strong, highly reactive soaps doesn’t happen overnight. I find it can take one to two years of repeated washings.
Cars look “clean” but run the palm of your hand over surface and it will squeak instead of glide across.
Reason is no wax and clearcoat surface is
drying out. Again, if you look at paint with powerful magnifier, damage will look like very small and shallow, irregularly shaped pits.
This allows oxygen in air to work on pigment layer underneath. Eventually color and effects begin to degrade.
This is why I don’t use touch-less in-bays or tunnels.