Originally Posted by Steve Hellums
The SRT6 manual say's that the I/C pump is operated by a pulse voltage from a control module. I'm a licensed electrican and also have a degree in electronic's. I pulse voltage to me means that it would be like a square wave form, this inverted with a line across the top ( l_l l_l ), used mainly in speed control applications. Does anybody know what they are talking about? I have a hard time believing that the pump is variable speed. I'm wanting to tap into the pump curcuit to get it to run anytime I turn my aftercooler fans on.
I believe what you are referring to is Pulse Width Modulation. However, "pulse voltage" does not mean anything to me and I went through four years of electrical engineering training with formal power and analog electronics training. That term sounds like wrench-jargon to me and does not necessarily indicate a PWM circuit. In any case, a PWM motor could still be a straight-up DC motor, so if you hook up 12VDC to it, it should still turn.
There are only a few motor types that require any kind of modulated voltage to operate. The most likely are switched reluctance and stepper/servomotors. Now, I don't know anything about the motor that's in the IC pump, but I do know that stepper/servomotors would be a
very expensive thing to have driving a pump. Switched reluctance motors can be identified by measuring the inductance of the motor as the shaft is rotated. The reluctance motor would have a big change in inductance as it is rotated.
Finally, the last possibility is that the IC pump motor is 3-phase. I'm not sure that's likely either.
Hopefully someone else will have more insight.