The Catches: Safety Valve of Electrolytic Capacitor

Whether one believes in luck or not, for me there is no deniable that at times luck play a crucial part in life.

I remember my lucky escape from getting injured dealing with a boost converter with electrolytic capacitor. It was a brand new design – a boost that generate 100V. Something was not right – it could not go up to 100V – so I was having this board vised up ( to see what a “vise” is, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vise) is  to ease probing on each side – with those cap facing me (bad bad choice).

While I my face was inches away from the board – one of the cap exploded and shooting up hot boiling oily substance right pass me, hitting my cubicle wall about 1 meter way – it turns out that wrong part was installed – it was a 48V part.

It could at best cause some burnt on my not so handsome face – or at worst blinded me… come to think about that – I was simply lucky enough to escape un-injured and extremely thankful. To show you what i meant, i managed to find just a similar end result from wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_capacitor) as shown below:

Lesson learnt – those weak points being built on top of the capacitor can is the “safety valve” – it is designed to open up (“explode”) under overheat – overvoltage condition – never ever face the valve toward you or anybody else.