Using a Very Simple Capacimeter to Evaluate Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors Health Status
Acácio M. R. Amaral, António J. Marques Cardoso · International Journal of Engineering · 2013
This paper presents a very simple circuit that is able to measure capacitors capacitance, based on the estimation of capacitors discharge time. The proposed prototype is able to compute the time required by a capacitor to discharge three fourths of the stored energy. For that, a simple RC circuit is used, composed of the capacitor under test and some resistors, two operational amplifiers, which are used to identify the starting and ending points of the discharge time, four 4-bit counters, four BCD to 7 segment drivers and four displays of 7 segments, which show the computed capacitor capacitance. Several experimental results are presented