Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

I need to pot a 3kv capacitor, is silicone going to work ok?

Status
Not open for further replies.

jpoopdog

Member
Im replacing the capacitor in this monitor inverter board https://imgur.com/eEEpPgd

its neccesary however that i reapply insulation at least on the HV out.
Can i use a regular 100% silicone caulking rubber for insulation? I cant for some reason find any high voltage insulation applied as liquid anywhere, leading me to believe that everyone uses some other common product that works so effectively that its not neccesary to produce a product that serves that specific purpose.

Otherwise if not silicone, could i use liquid electrical tape? the brush on stuff made by starbrite? I dont know how well their stuff works, all i know is its solvent based
 
Use a hot melt glue gun.

This section of the forum is dead this was posted years ago and no replies. I guess i wont post anything here I will die of old age before anyone sees it. LOL.
 
tried hot melt glue, my spark gap ignitors (50kv at least) arc easily through it, the silicone however i tried with completely insulated it so much that the charge was forced to build up and slowly and noisily leak through the wires over about 3 seconds from turning the power off, normally it discharges through the air in an instant. i think like 3mm of silicone blocked 50kv. Anyway, i now know it works.
 
You are looking too much in to this;
Your capacitor is only rated max at 3 Kilo volts.
Why bother with a 50KV tester through the hot melt glue?
If there is in fact a potential of more than 3KV across the cap, there is something else wrong and it is bound for failure.
Any of the non corrosive RTV sealers will be more than enough for the application. such as:
**broken link removed**
Too expensive for a single application though.:eek:
What you see used (gray silicone) has a higher dielectric than 3kv meant for much wider application beside just a monitor. ie; (Shin-Etsu)

CFL Hv cap failures in monitors are not that uncommon and most of the time caused by device quality issues or simply a design with no head room.
In this case, if available, I would choose a same value with higher KV rating provided the space is not an issue.
 
damn, true i should have gotten higher values. I actually did buy some accidentally but then had my order changed from the 6kv ones to the 3kv ones.

my 50kv spark gap ignitor was the only high voltage power supply i had available to test with.
The silicone i wound up getting was neutral curing clear stuff. Not especially UV resistant nor especially resistant to mold. Basically just pure and clean.

I did a test, all 6 capacitors on the board had different readings. although my multimeter barely reads 15pf, it did allow me to see some are wearing out.

i also made a new developement in hunting the fault. It seems when the wires are leaking HV, and in the dark i can see a corona discharge, arcing into the grounded back board, the monitor works. When the wires arent allowed to do this, there is no noise, and no backlight starting up too, its like its triggering a over voltage sensor in the backlight circuit somewhere.

the backlight inverter has 6 CCFL tubes i believe, since there are 6 outputs.

When the backlight is up and running, the noisy arcing stops. i can however still see some violet glow comming off the other 3 of the 6 leads where they are all bundled together. These gave readings which suggested they werent failing.

anyway though, point is, the silicone i have now appears to be working, but now the problem has spread or is at least being shared elsewhere. I might post a new thread somewhere else about this since ive done allot of studying on it and i need to explain everything before asking for help on it.
 
Can i use a regular 100% silicone caulking rubber for insulation?

Historically EHT triplers in TV's were potted in silicon rubber (so that was 25KV or so) - and because it was soft and easily removed, we did occasionally 'scoop it out', replace the faulty components inside, and then re-pot with silicon rubber.

We didn't use caulking tubes, we used small tubes bought from RS Components (I don't even remember silicon rubber caulking been available back then?), but I would imagine caulking would be fine - and it smells identical :D
 
Hi Nigel,
I have often wondered if the acetic acid in the caulking tubes of silicone rubber (Which I think gives the silicone it's smell.) would cause corosion to the component wires over time.

Les.
 
Hi Nigel,
I have often wondered if the acetic acid in the caulking tubes of silicone rubber (Which I think gives the silicone it's smell.) would cause corosion to the component wires over time.

It's not a problem I ever found, and presumably the silicon used by the manufacturers also used acetic acid.
 
Hi Nigel,
I have often wondered if the acetic acid in the caulking tubes of silicone rubber (Which I think gives the silicone it's smell.) would cause corosion to the component wires over time.

Les.

Correct; while it may not be apparent, Acetic acid combined with oxygen can eventually corrode contacts and I have seen it.
As a matter of fact, there is no acetic acid in Electrical silicon rubber which is more expensive. ie, it is a definite no-no in safety applications such as Avionics.
Compare RTV162 vs RTV108
 
Ive since dicovered that while the capacitors were in bad shape the actual problem seems to be the CCFL tubes themselves. Looks like ill have to remove and replace them or switch them for LEDs
 
In the electrical industry we use Guruflex. Which is a two component mix which needs to be mixed in 6 litre quantities. It is blue coloured and has a rubber texture.
Will post some pics tomorrow as I am using it tonight.
Rated at 10kV /mm.
 
Couple of pics attached.
Two component to be mixed, it ends up like a type of rubber, used in an 11000 Volts linkbox on outside High Voltage switchgear.
2016-10-05_19-55-17.jpg 2016-10-05_19-55-53.jpg 2016-10-05_19-56-28.jpg 2016-10-05_19-56-57.jpg
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top