Capacitor Plague

[mikmas]

Came across this slightly alarming post on Wiki...

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

Seems to be limited to digital gear (computers, etc) but I've never heard of it. Worth checking out if buying (or own) 10 - 15 year old kit. ;)

[cyclopse]

Came across this slightly alarming post on Wiki...

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

Seems to be limited to digital gear (computers, etc) but I've never heard of it. Worth checking out if buying (or own) 10 - 15 year old kit. ;)

The washing suffered with this the other weekend. You can see the swollen top of the capacitor body.

[NRG]

Yup, I've fixed quite a few motherboards suffering from these faulty caps and a number of HP Printers as well.

[StanleyB]

There is actually a lot more to this story, but seems not to have been covered in that link.
The jest of it is as follows:
A famous capacitor manufacturer (Rubicon) had developed a special cap formula, and asked a Japanese company to make those caps in bulk. The price was quite high, but they sold well. An enterprising engineer stole the formula and ran away with it to Taiwan, where he set up a company to make a copy of those caps with the chemicals in that formula. He then offered the far cheaper copy to the same list of companies that used to buy the genuine item.
Unfortunately this chap had stolen a wrongly translated copy of the document. So the copied cap had a wrong mixture. These copies would explode or burst open under heavy load. Dell and Gateway were the largest victims of this problem, and it nearly bankrupted Dell.

And in case you think that I am telling fibs, you can read more about it at:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/29/dell-problems-capacitors

[Yomanze]

There is actually a lot more to this story, but seems not to have been covered in that link.
The jest of it is as follows:
A famous capacitor manufacturer (Rubicon) had developed a special cap formula, and asked a Japanese company to make those caps in bulk. The price was quite high, but they sold well. An enterprising engineer stole the formula and ran away with it to Taiwan, where he set up a company to make a copy of those caps with the chemicals in that formula. He then offered the far cheaper copy to the same list of companies that used to buy the genuine item.
Unfortunately this chap had stolen a wrongly translated copy of the document. So the copied cap had a wrong mixture. These copies would explode or burst open under heavy load. Dell and Gateway were the largest victims of this problem, and it nearly bankrupted Dell.

And in case you think that I am telling fibs, you can read more about it at:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/29/dell-problems-capacitors

Yup I remember this, a lot of caps blowing when they really shouldn't have.

[mikmas]

There is actually a lot more to this story, but seems not to have been covered in that link.



Covered in the Wiki article Stan if you read down to the bottom ;)
Heading = Industrial espionage implicated