Noninvasive Online Condition Monitoring of Output Capacitor’s ESR and C for a Flyback Converter

Since electrolytic capacitors are primarily responsible for breakdowns in power electronics converters and have the trait of high failure rate, their reliability is a tremendous concern. Consequently, an appropriate monitoring as well as fault diagnosis system should be laid emphasis on. In this paper, an original and accurate online scheme applied to estimate the output capacitor of the flyback converter is put forward. By analyzing the voltage ripple of the output electrolytic capacitor in detail, an online mathematical model for the equivalent series resistance (ESR) and capacitance (C) is derived. A trigger circuit and an isolated amplification circuit are designed to catch the output voltage ripple values at certain instants of switching cycle, which are sent to digital signal processor for the calculation of ESR and C. The proposed scheme is noninvasive as no extra current sensor is needed. In order to verify the feasibility of the scheme, a prototype of the online monitoring system is built and experiments are conducted.