Capacitor plague – Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#21

Post by jdietrich » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:16 AM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #8

dictum wrote: post #6

A similar phenomenon is that of swollen lithium ion batteries: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swollen+battery

Does this phenomenon have an identified timespan like the capacitor plague? Is it over now? When Android was a new thing, the swollen battery was one of the many things wrong with my G1 phone. Haven't encountered it on any device since then, fortunately.

>Does this phenomenon have an identified timespan like the capacitor plague? Is it over now?

As Samsung recently demonstrated, lithium batteries are far from a solved problem. There are already reports of iPhone 8s disintegrating due to puffed batteries.

We still don't fully understand the chemistry of lithium batteries, but the market keeps demanding higher energy density. There are bound to be blunders along the way.

https://wccftech.com/iphone-8-swollen-batteries/

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#22

Post by g051051 » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:16 AM UTC

ysleepy wrote: post #14

I remember soldering in new caps into a PIII Abit Mainboard that stopped working. Good times... (haha maybe not) But the issue was known to interested parties and generally publicised.

I had to replace the caps in my SyncMaster 204B. The problem was so pervasive that I ordered a kit for my monitor online that had all the caps I needed for this particular monitor.

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#23

Post by paulie_a » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:20 AM UTC

I have nothing to add outside of some nostalgia: I once had a dual Celeron rig that fell to this problem. It started with not turning on after hitting the power button. Sometimes it took two to twenty times. I remember when it finally died, after bartending a Phish concert near Milwaukee.

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#24

Post by magila » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:22 AM UTC

This ended up having a lasting legacy as many motherboard manufactures switched to Japanese made and/or polymer capacitors. They would tout this fact in their marketing material as a sign of quality. Tech sites started noting the source of a board's caps in their reviews. To this day you will sometimes see "all solid capacitors" in the marketing literature for a motherboard.

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#25

Post by vondur » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:33 AM UTC

I had a GeForce card at the time that died from the bad capacitor problems. I also remember many iMac’s with failed capacitors.

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#26

Post by cududa » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:35 AM UTC

When I was in High School our school district had a ton of computers by state grant (1 for every 2 students). One summer (2005 if I remember correctly) the IBM desktops all started popping capacitors. Me and a few technically inclined friends got a nice summer job out of identifying affected machines, gathering them up, re-imaging them, and replacing them around the district.

Funny to learn this was such a widespread issue

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#27

Post by inopinatus » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:42 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #12

I don't know why, but bad electrolytic capacitors also sometimes have a fishy smell.

IANAC but my research suggests the odour is due to the presence of amine salts of boric acid in the electrolyte. Any chemists on hand to confirm or correct this?

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#28

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:45 AM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #11

tzaman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A victim here. My 2007 MacBook Pro started to swell on the bottom after a couple of years, didn't think much of it, it was a tiny bump at first, but then it almost doubled in thickness so I replaced it with a cheap Chinese knockoff (was broke at the time due to starting a startup), and the same thing happened in about a year. Lesson learned.

same in 2009 model, i'm using it right now, (without OS X of course). there is now a 4-2mm lip on the underside where the battery panel is being pushed out. I still get about 40mins and seems to have stopped swelling so what the heck :P Anyway these days Apple sells those sort of things as "features"... lets call it a "leg gripping lip" allows lap usage at strange angles.

Hey, you probably know that but just in case: charging a swollen battery is a fire hazard.

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#29

Post by isostatic » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:48 AM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #7

Audio equipment got hit by this too. I scored a very nice surround receiver and speaker set this way; someone had put it on the curb, so I took it home for examination, and $20 in replacement caps later it was good to go. Lasted me years, until an evil-minded cat threw up in it.

Quite normal on a night shift to replace hundreds of surface mount capacitors from a calrec sound desk. Well normal for my colleagues - my soldering is terrible, I spent the time writing perl instead.

Re: Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

#30

Post by dfox » Mon, Nov 06, 2017, 12:54 AM UTC

magila wrote: post #24

This ended up having a lasting legacy as many motherboard manufactures switched to Japanese made and/or polymer capacitors. They would tout this fact in their marketing material as a sign of quality. Tech sites started noting the source of a board's caps in their reviews. To this day you will sometimes see "all solid capacitors" in the marketing literature for a motherboard.

It is slightly questionable whether this episode is really the cause for the switch. Around the same time frame significantly faster switching transistors became available which allowed DC-DC converters to reach higher efficiency by increasing switching frequency, which has the nice side effect of requiring smaller filtering capacitors at the expense of requiring lower ESL/ESR.

Also over past 5 years or so small chip low-voltage MLCCs became available in previously unheard of capacities that are perfectly usable for many bulk filtering applications with prices that are competitive with aluminium electrolytics.