Power converter based test bench design for aluminum electrolytic capacitor development

Aluminum electrolytic capacitors are applied in most of power electronic systems. The current shape of the DC-link capacitors in the PWM converters is similar to a bipolar square wave signal. The standards of Aluminum electrolytic capacitors doesn´t contain electrical tests such kind of stress caused by the PWM control methods. The paper briefly presents the construction and structure of Aluminum electrolytic capacitors for power electronics and describes the actual generally applied test methods. Afterwards the real stress of the Aluminum electrolytic capacitors in PWM applications is investigated. According to the simulation results a test bench is proposed and presented.