Physics Based Degradation Models for Electrolytic Capacitor Prognostics under Thermal Overstress Conditions

Abstract

Electronics subsystems play an increasingly important role in safety critical systems for monitoring, control, and enhanced functionality. Electrolytic capacitors are an important component in ,amy subsystems that range from power supplies on safety critical avionics equipment to power drivers for electro-mechanical actuators. These capacitors are ideal forpassing or bypassing low-frequency signals in power supplies but are known to have lower reliability compared to ceramic and tantalum capacitors, and given their criticality in electronicssubsystems they are a good candidate for component level monitoring and prognostics. Prognostics provides a way to assess remaining useful life of components and systems based on their current state of health and their anticipated future use and operating conditions. Past experiences have shown that capacitor degradation and failures are quite prevalent under high electrical and thermal stress conditions that they experience during operations. Our focus in this work is on deriving a physics-based degradation model for electrolytic capacitors under thermal stress conditions. As part of our methodology, we study the effects of accelerated aging due to thermal stress on a batch of capacitors stored at high ambient temperature conditions. This provides a framework for supplementing theoretical modeling with data collected from simultaneous experiments, which is then used to validate the derived models. This work represents a first step toward combining data driven and physics-based approaches for modeling capacitor degradation. The case study shows how the proposed technique is applied to a batch of identically manufactured capacitors.