Capacitors for high power electronics

Many different types of capacitors are available today, most being designed for mounting on circuit boards or other electronic equipment. Generally these fall into the classes of ceramic, tantalum, electrolytic or DC film capacitors. Larger sizes of capacitors are used in applications such as motor drives and kilowatt to multimegawatt average power, power conditioning equipment. These larger capacitors, operating to voltages in excess of 25 kV, have traditionally been manufactured with paper or polypropylene films, or some combination therein, with or without a gas-excluding liquid impregnant. This paper focuses on defining the technology issues for next generation energy storage capacitors, starting from the current state-of-the art for large (over 5 kg) capacitors recently developed for modern pulsed power conditioning applications.