I recently learned that my brother-in-law was about to dispose of an Acer monitor. When I asked him what was wrong with it, he told me that the monitor worked fine most of the time, but it would intermittently stop working. I suggested that if it worked well "sometimes," it might just be a filter that was misbehaving or a component that stopped functioning when it started heating up. He couldn’t really detect a trend, and he didn’t want to deal with electronics troubleshooting.
Since I’m a manufacturing engineer, I don’t know a lot about electronics, either, but I decided to lug it home. If I couldn’t find the flaw, I figured I could at least find good use for some of the components.
I opened up the monitor, and as soon as I had all the guts out, I noticed that a few electrolytic capacitors had blown. When an electrolytic capacitor blows, you can see the damage -- its top bulges out, much like a dome. That obviously was an issue, but I also had to find out whether the capacitors had blown because they were bad or because there was a failure upstream that caused the components to self-destruct.
I researched the issue on the Internet and found that this was a common problem with Acer monitors. The capacitors they used were inferior; replacing a handful of them solved the issue. In fact, the issue was so rampant among the owners of Acer monitors, there were sites online offering capacitor kits specifically for Acer monitors. A couple of days later, I bought some decent capacitors, soldered them into the boards, and hoped that the monitor worked. It did, and it is still working a year later.
I wonder how many monitors ended up thrown in the trash just because of a few inferior capacitors that the company decided to use in order to save a few cents.
This entry was submitted by Nauzad Tantra and edited by Rob Spiegel.
Nauzad Tantra has received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a PhD in manufacturing engineering. He has worked in various industries in India, China, the UK, and the US, and he has helped various companies with turnkey low-cost automation and mechatronics projects. Tantra is passionate about innovation, green technologies, and disruptive technologies.
Tell us your experience in solving a knotty engineering problem. Send stories to Rob Spiegel for Sherlock Ohms.
Good point, Nancy. Today too many "prestige" manufacturers are no longer taking care of their good name: take for example Panasonic. It was considered that the very best TV screens available were the famous "Viera" plasma displays by that company. But, inexplicably, they decided to design their circuitry to intentionally diminish the contrast in several steps, so that the marvelous deep blacks and amazing contrast just went down the drain at "X" hours of use thanks to the on-purpose firmware. This intentional, "By design" move was probably made in order to make the panels last a given number of hours, but the buyer was actually cheated! As in your case with your Sony camera, the Panasonic plasmas were pretended to be free from defects, and operating "as designed"... but the owners kept noticing that the rich, deep blacks were turning a dull dark grey instead. I guess the Class Action Suite is still in the court, and the company still denies anything wrong, and keeps sending defective-by-design products to many unsuspecting customers. On the theme of counterfeit electronic components, I can attest to the seriousness of the problem: I've seen examples of almost perfect falsifications of large electrolytic capacitors dressed like Hitachi ones, but the initial performance is marginal and with many units open-circuited on delivery. the only way to identify these fakes is by checking the numbers in the official Hitachi catalog, where you can see the "FA" series does not exist in the Hitachi line of capacitors.
But the problem is much more serious when you start finding other components like TO-3 cased power transistors: I've seen and tested several examples of faked Motorola MJ15001 and 15002 power transistors that were in reality repackaged 2N3055 or similar!!! The fake factory got or implemented a way to imitate the exact appearance of the expensive, heavy duty 15001 by placing inside the can a much lesser, garden variety 2N3055. At first sight, the transistor looks and tests "good", but will fail miserably at higher currents or breakdown voltage, well under the authentic one specifications. The same is happening in IC's and many kinds of electronic components, so beware!. Amclaussen.
I used to catch grief all the time for refusing to mess with someone else's design until I could find sufficient documentation (like a schematic! and some notes would have been nice) to get some idea of why the original engineer picked the parts he did!
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