A Real-Time Predictive-Maintenance System of Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors Used in Uninterrupted Power Supplies

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost method to realize a real-time condition monitoring and a predictive-maintenance system of an electrolytic capacitor used in uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs). This method consists in detecting the changes in real time of the equivalent series resistance and the capacitance <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</i> values of the electrolytic capacitors. Simulation and experimental results are presented to illustrate the proposed monitoring technique. The proposed method can be used in UPS where waveforms are continuously varying in amplitude, frequency, and temperature. The proposed online failure prediction method has the merits of using only the existent resources in UPS and with the use of known algorithms.