Determining the Sparking Voltage of Working Electrolytes

Sparking voltage is one of the vital parameters of the working electrolytes for aluminum electrolytic capacitors, which determines the operating voltage of the capacitors. However, the existing methods for measuring the sparking voltage suffer from low accuracy, bad reproducibility, high artificial error, etc. In this paper, we reported a versatile approach to determining the sparking voltage of the electrolytes. By a linear fitting procedure, the voltage-time data acquired from the test experiments were transformed into a correlation coefficient-time curve. Since the abrupt correlation coefficient change due to the occurrence of sparking could be more readily identified in the correlation coefficient-time curve, the limit voltage of the electrolyte was accurately determined. Thus, this voltage was subtracted from the IR drop in the solution to get the true sparking voltage of the electrolyte. This method prevented artificial errors arising from the direct observation or listening of sparking features, by which reliable and reproducible results can be gained by a computer program. This study provided active support for the development of high-performance working electrolytes.