Metallized polymer film capacitors ageing law based on capacitance degradation

Passive components, particularly capacitors, are very used devices in power electronics applications providing key function on board. Nevertheless, capacitors breakdowns can have catastrophic consequences on the financial and human scale; a good acquaintance of their deterioration over time would contribute in the improvement of the availability of the whole system by performing a predictive maintenance on the component. This operation requires the knowledge of the capacitor ageing law and their failure mechanisms associated to the application. Capacitance loss can be mainly attributed to the self-healing process occurring in metallized film capacitors when used under high steady electrical and thermal stresses. In this paper, a capacitance ageing law is proposed based on the identification of voltage and temperature degradation kinetics from three experimental floating ageing tests performed at different voltage and temperature constraints. A total of 34 capacitors provided from different manufacturers using polyester film as dielectric have been studied and compared to validate the proposed law.