Integrated Diagnostic/Prognostic Experimental Setup for Capacitor Degradation and Health Monitoring

Electrolytic capacitors and power MOSFET’s have higher failure rates than other components in DC-DC converter systems. Currently, our work focuses on experimental analysis and modeling electrolytic capacitors degradation and its effects on the output of DC-DC converter systems.

The output degradation is typically measured by the increase in Equivalent series resistance and decrease in capacitance leading to output ripple currents.Typically, the ripple current effects dominate, and they can have adverse effects on downstream components. A model based approach to studying degradation phenomena enables us to combine the physics based modeling of the DC-DC converter with physics of failure models of capacitor degradation, and predict using stochastic simulation methods how system performance deteriorates with time.