A Unified Capacitor Stress Emulation Method for High-Power Converter Applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a unified capacitors stress emulation method, which has two unique test capabilities: 1) concurrent electrical stress emulation to AC capacitors and DC capacitors; 2) different electrical stress levels (including different ripple current, ripple voltage, and DC voltage) can be individually controlled for the testing samples. It preserves the advantages of a recently reported method with a minimum required power supply and is robust to testing sample degradation. This method is suitable for application-oriented stress emulation testing with different types of DC / AC capacitors and multiple electrical stresses in high power converter systems. The circuit architecture and testing ability of this method are presented. Moreover, analytical models are derived to size the key components to realize various testing requirements. Proof-of-concept experimental results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed test method.