A Stress Emulation Method for Concurrent Testing of AC and DC Capacitors

This paper proposes a capacitor testing method that can concurrently emulate the electrical stresses of both AC and DC capacitors for high-power converter applications. It preserves the advantages of a recently reported method with a minimum required power sup-plies and is robust to testing sample degradation, which, however, limits to test either AC or DC capacitors. The circuit architecture and application examples are presented. Experimental results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed testing method.

I. Introduction

Capacitor is one of the highest failure rate components in power electronic systems [1]. The degradation and failure of capacitors could lead to worse filtering capability and over-stresses as well as severe catastrophe to the power converters [2]. The realistic stress testing of capacitors is significant part in the performance charac-terization and lifetime prediction of capacitors [3] [4].