In this master thesis, we present the development of an electrical system for ageing and lifetime assessment of electrolytic capacitors. The main purpose of the system is to excite the capacitor under test with AC current at rated DC voltage and log the electrical parameters, such as temperature, current and voltage until the capacitor’s failure.
We investigated two design approaches:
- capacitor excitation by switching between two capacitor banks and
- capacitor excitation with separate DC and AC power supplies.
We analyzed both circuits in LTspice software and chose the principle with separate DC and AC bias which turned to be most suitable for the purpose. Based on the simulation results, we designed a test circuit board. After thorough board analysis, we designed the final circuit board, where we implemented the Atmel microprocessor for easier control and analysis.
The final circuit board is capable to excite the capacitor under test with up to 6 A of AC current at 48 V of DC voltage. The frequency of the AC current is set to 15kHz, but it can be set to a different value inside the microcontroller software. The final circuit board sends the RMS, average and maximum value of the capacitor AC current to the computer, using USB communication.
Using the final circuit board we tested a capacitor of a poor quality, which we overloaded up to the point, when it failed after 10 hours of aging.
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