Aluminum Electrolytics

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, J.C. Wren wrote: We were charging magnet structures for speaker design and development. The capacitors were 'dumped' thru a coil of 3/8" x 1/4" copper bar-stock, using a small GE distribution-type oil circuit breaker to close the loop. The magnet assemblies were placed inside this coil, then the switch closed. We could get 6 to 9 Tesla in the gaps this way. The power supply I built to charge the bank suffered a partial regulator failure (I was using 4 type 6080 tubes as pass elements) and began putting out high ripple. The caps were 800VDC 850V max rated, and the ripple exceeded this and gradually degraded a couple of them until they failed - spectacularly. Damn fine thing I wasn't actually close to the bank when it detonated - there was shrapnel and cpacitor-guts-fluff all over everywhere. Sorry for the topic drift - I tried to tie this in with classiccmp, but.... Cheerz John