DIYbanter - View Single Post - Any Smart DumbAss in here knows How to Increase the Capacitance of Electrolyte Capacitor?

Pieter

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 04:42:53 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Mar 9, 10:47*am, "Michael*A.*Terrell"
wrote:
Hello folks,

I am getting cheap these days, I am trying to cut corner by tripling the
capacitance in the capacitor, is this possible? *I have heard that it's
possible. *Some people have done it successfully. *I am just wondering if
any of you smart dumbass can help.

If you weren't quite the ill-informed idiot that you are, you'd know
that the dielectric in an electrolytic capacitor is formed by the
electrolytic oxidation of the surface of the aluminium foil the forms
the plates of the capacitor.

If you reverse bias the capacitor you can reverse this process, making
the dielectric thinner ( and more likely to break down). Sadly, the
reverse process is unlikely to thin the oxide layer to exactly the
same extent at every point, so you run the risk of lowering the
breakdown voltage faster than you increase the capacitance.

As cheap goes, this about a poor and investment of your time as you
could make - short of slandering me in this user group which however
does seem to give you some kind of demented satisfaction - but do try
it. You won't enjoy the process at all, but does that worry me?

Agree. Use a strong power supply (3A or more), use high voltages. And
listen carefully, you can actually hear the capacitance grow.

P.