Analysis of electrolytic capacitor degradation under electrical overstress for prognostic studies

Abstract

The implementation of prognostics methodologies to electrical and electronics components and systems has become essential and critical as these systems find more prominence recently as they replace traditional systems in several critical applications. There are several challenges due to great variety of components used in a system, a continuous development of new electronics technologies, and a general lack of understanding of how electronics fail. Traditional reliability techniques in electronics tend to focus on understanding the time to failure for a batch of components of the same type. In this work we discuss degradation in electrolytic capacitors which are part of power supplies and are very crucial in their operation. We discuss our experimental setup and further present our findings related to the degradation observed in these capacitors under accelerated electrical aging under different operating conditions. The understanding of the time dependent degradation process is critical for the development of model based prognostics algorithms which provide a continuous condition-based estimation of the remaining useful life of the device under test.