Salvo wrote:
Onan Microquiet is known to adversely affect PD performance.
Some Qs:
Is the Onan Microquiet an inverter gen?
If so, do you know what the waveform looks like?
For non-inverter gens, one would expect a pure sine wave output. After all, the gen is producing the voltage by cutting magnetic field lines with a rotating rotor winding in a constant field produced by the stator (or vice versa) where the voltage should be proportional to the sine of the angle between the rotating rotor windings and the field lines.
Nonetheless, I've seen scope plots showing that's not the case in practice. My rotating armature Onan does produce a pretty good sine wave, but it has no voltage control module to control the field current. The field current is basically constant. In that design, the voltage is a function of rotor speed and the voltage should only drop if the load increases enough to slow the rotor speed. Fortunately the CCK is a cast iron design and the rotor has lots of mas, making it hard for a sudden increase in load to slow the rotor speed.
I believe the more recent rotating field Onans with voltage control modules will reduce the field strength during the part of the rotation when the low PF converter isn't trying to top off the cap voltage, then at the peak, when the charger tries to pull lots of current, the gen's voltage controller can't increase the current to the field windings quickly enough - so the peak of the sine output isn't as high as it should be.
Of course, that's just a guess about what's happening and why my CCK works fine when others report that rotating field Onans don't play well with low PF converter/chargers.
