ESR Estimation for Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitor of Power Electronic Converter Based on Compressed Sensing and Wavelet Transform

The aluminum electrolytic capacitor (AEC) is one of the most important parts of a power electronic converter. Throughout its lifespan, the equivalent series resistance (ESR) of the AEC will increase, which will affect the performance of the power electronic converter. To guarantee the reliability of a converter, it is necessary to monitor the health state of the AEC, for which one common technique is to estimate the ESR of the AEC. Equipment with a high sampling rate is usually required because converter usually works at a high frequency. This requirement will increase the cost of ESR monitoring. To address this issue, this article proposes a novel method of estimating the ESR for an AEC. The proposed method uses an innovative compressed sensing approach to acquire the ripple voltage and current. Instead of complete reconstruction of the ripple voltage and current, only the high-frequency features in the wavelet subspace are reconstructed and used to calculate the ESR. The proposed method reduces the cost of data sampling, transmission, and storage. This method is not limited by the converter circuit structure and can be applied in various environments. Simulations and experiments were carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.