[Techtalk] what is bricking?

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

agoats at compuserve.com wrote:

> As a safety feature to keep capacitors from blowing up  like a
> stick of dynamite, many have vents that blow out at the leads.
> Since the leads are at the bottom of the board, you may not ever
> see where the smoke came from. Most of these have a rubber stopper
> type bottom that the leads come out of. This is for "soft"
> capacitor failures and it's the more common method for failing.

This must be the kind of failures I've seen (or, rather, not seen, as
it were). (:
 
> I had a sealed HVAC  (High Voltage AC) capacitor go in the more 
> spectacular fashion on my air conditioner compressor outside my
> house. It sounded like a .38 or 9mm caliber pistol next to the
> house, blew the entire end off of the welded, sealed lid and spewed
> about 40 feet of metal films and insulator ribbon inside the
> housing, as well as denting the sides of the steel enclosure.

I hope you took photos, because that sounds like a "Check *this* out!"
event. (:

> The amount of bang and physical destruction depends on the
> capacitor value and voltage. This is where all the energy is; and
> the more energy, the greater the bang. A 100 microFarad 10V
> capacitor might make a phhfffft! sound while a 180,000 microFarad
> 10,000 Volt capacitor is a few sticks of dynamite.

The ones we've heard were mostly the smaller ones, thank goodness!

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.