How can one tiny component, like a capacitor, cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just a few years?
Well, it's a lot easier than you might think. As demands grew in the early 2000s, capacitor manufacturers were turning towards new ways to meet these technological demands while lowering costs. Ultimately, some of the decisions led to massive losses for consumer tech companies during an event called the "Capacitor Plague."
To learn exactly what happened, check out the video above. Or if you're looking for some great capacitors with the latest tried-and-true tech, check out our capacitor product listings, which is chock-full of awesome components -- like the Eaton 0.22F Super Capacitor below!
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Today on Tech Trivia we’re going to talk about the Capacitor Plague. The Capacitor Plague was an event around 2002 thru 2005 involving capacitors produced from about 1999 to 2003. This is an intriguing story about pushing the limits of chemistry and the industrial espionage used to get ahead of the competition in the world of low impedance capacitors. Low impedance capacitors were a bit of a dream at the time. They allowed for more aggressive designs they handled higher ripple currents and filters that are more effective with less stages. Low impedance capacitors did exist but they were not cheap or they didn’t last very long. Using water as the primary electrolyte solvent was a solution for making cheap low impedance capacitors, but water also caused the creation of aluminum hydroxide and premature failure in the capacitors.
In the late 90’s Rubicon successfully commercialized a formula of additives that suppressed aluminum hydration. After this development, the story gets interesting. A material scientist from Rubicon left and went to work for a competitor in China. He created a copy of the water based electrolyte which was stolen by staff to produce a cheap electrolyte. It was bought in large quantities by a Taiwanese capacitor manufactures. There was a problem, the formula that staff stole was incomplete and missing some of the additives used to stabilize the capacitors. They were cheap and many manufacturers purchased them immediately. Taiwanese aluminum electrolytic capacitors accounted for about thirty percent of the global shipment. It took a bit for problems to for the problem to become apparent with the parts, but when they did com, it was sometimes with a small dome at the top of the capacitor, brown goo, or sometimes the capacitors would completely pop open with a bang.
The failures were widespread and drew the attention of academics like, Ed Sparling at EDM, and Passive Components Industry Magazine 2002. By late 2002, the general public was starting to see news articles about the mass failures of electronics and the electronics manufacturers were starting to see the pain. Once all was said and done, companies saw massive losses. It reportedly costs Dell abut 300,000,000 and HP had to scrap their entire 2004 production. Apple also saw issues in their power supplies and mother boards on the G5max.
The capacitors caused the premature failure of a wide variety of consumer electronics. Most of the bad capacitors have worked their way out of the supply chain but the lessons remain. You need to be sure that your supplier is maintaining their end of the contract and not using non approved suppliers to their own parts to cut costs. Always be sure work with suppliers and distributors that maintain quality supply chains from the materials to the finished product.