Capacitor Plague- Industrial Espionage Incident Ends in Manufacturing Catastrophe

[silverfox]

I've mentioned this in other Forums and don't know if it has ever been brought up here. It is good to know as the time frame for the appearance of this failure mode event is still relevant, although to a lessening degree.

Synopsis: Engineer steals new and improved formula for water based capacitors but fails to obtain entire recipe resulting in mass production of defective capacitors with short life span and catastrophic failure mode.

See this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague


While this is a fading problem, due to the impulsive nature of purchases then mothballing of musical equipment, failures such as this my be closeted for years, then manifest when the equipment re-enters the market place through garage sales.

Silverfox.

[Jazz P Bass]

Yeah, this was brought up before.
http://music-electronics-forum.com/t18072/

It is good to rehash it.

The formula was missing the part about 'absorb produced hydrogen gas'.
DUH!

Apple, HP, Dell.... they all took a massive monetary hit.

I just replaced oozy caps on a flat screen display.
3 years old.

Sometimes it is not obvious that the cap is at issue.
I had a Behringer power amp (smirk) that acted really goofy.
Until the bad power cap finally went off like a geyser.

[Raybob]

Funny, I just finished building a new house, end of 2007. In 7 years of home maintenance, I've had a few toilet parts, clogged drains, a few minor things, but I've just had the 3rd motherboard fail on the 'new' furnace, needing to order another, or wire up something else that works. Also had mother board fail in big TV, twice, and mother board in LG refridgerator fail. Most with noticible capacitor bulge somewhere on the board with the Taiwan caps. Capacitor plague... been there, done that, bought the T-shirt a few times.