Radiator fan - why four wires instead of two ?

Grossel

Well-Known Member
Hi.

Same car as discussed here:

So, we took out the radiator fan because we initially taught it was dead. However, I managed to get it to run by using a small simple 12V transformer+rectifier (doesn't immediately broke if shorted, and too little maximum current to kill the fan motor).

But the question is why car manufacturer seems to put four wires to a fan? The measured resistance between each wire is too low to determine anything, therefore I tested on bench.
The test results yields the following observed result (omitting all test resulting in running in opposite direction).

See table below (I'm somehow not able to put cursor after table, so the table have to come last)

I also measured the voltage between the poles not used when fan was fed by two wires, i.e. while fan running for second last line in table, I measured just above 2.5VDC between black and blue (the weak transformer only manage to output ~6V to the fan running).

Because I doesn't have tested with a proper PSU yet, I'm not sure if the fan is fed using all four wires (like in last row) using a proper 12V supply will simply cause the fan to run faster (because the weak transformer itself is the main limiting factor). But then again why waste an extra wire if it turn out 3 wires should be enough ?

black wireYellow wireGreen wireBlu wireResult (does it run)
negativencncplusruns ok
negativencplusncruns ok
negativeplusncncNo running. Near short (around 2 ohms)
ncnegativencplusruns ok
ncnegativeplusncruns ok
negativenegativeplusplusruns ok
 
A lot of car fans run a various speeds. One way of doing that is to have several brushes and they are connected ind different ways to give different speeds.

Unless you have a really powerful supply and some way of measuring the speeds, you may not be able to tell which connections are giving faster and slower speeds.

This thread (https://www.electro-tech-online.com...-wiper-motor-circuit-this-complicated.164779/) was about two speed wiper motors, which are often achieved by having three brushes.
 
On a car fan I've just been using on a project, one wire was for a PWM signal at 100Hz (ish) for speed control and it had a second for an analog input also to control speed. Not sure on the Nissan ones but you will probably find it has some kind of speed control on it. Are all four wires the same gauge ?
 
Car fans can be up to 1 kW, so they would take about 80 A. Your "near short" of 2 Ohms would give about 6 A with the motor stalled, and it might be a combination that is used in the the car.

Some fans are controlled by LIN, but the ones that I have seen like that need a valid LIN signal to work, and they have two huge wires and one or two tiny ones.
 
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