On-line Failure Detection Method of DC Output Filter Capacitor in Power Converters

Abstract- Electrolytic capacitors are used in variety of equipments as smoothening element of the power converters because it has high capacitance for its size and low price. Electrolytic capacitors, which is most of the time affected by aging effect, plays a very important role for the power electronics system quality and reliability. Therefore it is important to estimate the parameter of an electrolytic capacitor to predict the failure. This objective of this paper is to propose a new method to detect the rise of equivalent series resistor(ESR) in order to realize the online failure prediction of electrolytic capacitor for DC output filter of power converter. The ESR of electrolytic capacitor estimated from RMS result of filtered waveform(BPF) of the ripple capacitor voltage/current. Therefore, the preposed online failure prediction method has the merits of easy ESR computation and circuit simplicity