On Jun 4, 23:31, Tony Duell wrote:
> I've had many tantalum capacitors catch fire over the years. They're
> pretty spectacular (and smell horrible :-(), but they rarely do any more
> damage.
>
> They seem to go low resistance both ways round (rather than becoming a
> diode), and pass enough current to overheat. Then the burst and spray
> burning bits out...
>
> I have never found a cause of this. I've had several boards that have
> been working fine when put away, but when I pull the out of storage and
> try them, the capacitors go up. They had a sufficiently high voltage
> rating for the position, etc.
> I don't think it happens to protect anything. The capacitor fails _at the
> normal operating voltage_.
Yes, I've seen several fail that way too. The most recent:
A few months ago, we had a "fire" in our machine room over the weekend,
which caused the systems to be automatically shut down. It turned out that
one tantalum cap in one of the PSUs on our 32-processor Origin2000 server
had burned up, the smoke detectors had been tripped, and the rest was
obvious. When the power was restored, everything came back up as normal.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
Received on Sat Jun 05 1999 - 04:31:28 BST