Abstract
DC Bus Electrolytic capacitors have been widely used in power conversion system because they can achieve high capacitance and voltage ratings with volumetric efficiency and low cost. This type of capacitors have been traditionally used for filtering, voltage smoothing, by-pass and other many applications in power conversion circuits requiring a cost effective and volumetric efficiency components. Unfortunately, electrolytic capacitors are some of the weakest components in power electronic converter. Many papers have proposed different methods or algorithms to determinate the ESR and/or capacitance C for fault diagnosis of the electrolytic capacitor. However, both ESR and C vary with frequency and temperature. Accurate knowledge of both values at the capacitors operating conditions is essential to achieve the best reference data of fault judgement. According to parameter analysis, the capacitance increases with temperature and the ESR decreases. Higher frequencies make the ESR and C to decrease. Analysis results show that the proposed electrolytic capacitor parameter estimation technique can be applied to reference signal of capacitor diagnosis systems successfully.