Any electronic type guru's out there?

[dakar]

Need some thoughts on this one. I got something stuck in my head yesterday and need to validate or invalidate my thinking a bit. Maybe this has already been done...who knows?

Here's my thought for a new wavemaker device to control powerheads, looking not to start and stop them, but leave them running continuously but vary the output flow up and down say from 100% to 60% and back up again on a timed circuit.

Frequent start and stops is very hard on them, and #1 failure cause.
They use a static field to drive the magnetic impeller, 110VAC at 60 Hz.

I think that swinging the voltage up and down would cause premature failure, or likely cause a collapse stator's magnetic field and stall. What about using a frequency divider to vary the frequency of the power, say swing it from 45 to 60 Hz.

We did a similar experiment in an electronics class where we built a circuit to hype up the frequency to the supplied current to make mechanical clocks go totally bonkers.

Thoughts on whether this would work effectively to control powerheads???
Or am I just plain putting too much thought into this?

[jerryc]

That is the way VFD work for ac motors but unless you can build one very
expensive [ Verbal Frequency Drive ]
And usual Thea end up Rather large and the ones i have installed all or changed Manuel