Abstract
Electrolytic capacitors have been widely used in power electronics system because of the features of large capacitance, small size, high-voltage, and low-cost. 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. The estimation of the equivalent series resistance(ESR) is important parameter in life condition monitoring of electrolytic capacitor. This paper proposes a simple technique to measure the ESR of an electrolytic capacitor. This method uses a switching DC/DC boost converter to measure the DC Bus capacitor ESR of power converter. Main advantage of the proposed method is very simple in technique, consumes very little time and requires only simple instruments. Simulation results are shown to verify the performance of the proposed method.