this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
8 points (90.0% liked)

Ask Electronics

3842 readers
18 users here now

For questions about component-level electronic circuits, tools and equipment.

Rules

1: Be nice.

2: Be on-topic (eg: Electronic, not electrical).

3: No commercial stuff, buying, selling or valuations.

4: Be safe.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
DavideAndrea@discuss.tchncs.de
linker3000@discuss.tchncs.de
8
Charged supercap with reverse polarity (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by TelepathicWalrus@lemmy.world to c/askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hey!

I have made a 24v supercapacitor bank which is made of 12 2.7v 20F supercapacitors, balancing resistors, charge resistor and a diode to bypass the charge resistor when in discharge mode.

The mistake was made when it was connected to a mean well LRS-100-24 which is a 24v 100W supply. When I powered it up the other control board was starting and stopping - the power supply was current limiting. Im not sure what voltage would have been applied to the supercapacitors but I think it wasn't high as the microprocessor on the other board was constantly resetting so the supercaps were not charged.

This happened for a maximum of 60s until I realised what was wrong and disconnected the caps.

My question is - will the capacitors be damaged from this event? Any help is very much appreciated.

Thanks

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They could be damaged. Only ways to tell would be to test the capacitance with a multi meter an to try them properly.

[–] TelepathicWalrus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When you say damaged, do you mean they would have slightly less capacitance or would they explode. They are over spec'd anyway so I can live with slightly less capacitance.

[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 2 points 1 week ago

They may be damaged internally and might not perform as expected. If they were going to explode, that was probably going to happen when they were backwards.

It is also quite possible that nothing happened if the circuit could not overcome the bias of the capacitor.