Purple Haze -Tantalum Cap must Die For my Pleasure!!

29 Dec 2014

I admit it ain't too creative but I really wanted to know if the purple flames from my accidental destruction of a Tantalum cap was a fluke.

I saw in Wikipedia that the flame test for tantalum is in deed blue so fancied a go at it and also it was an excuse to do some slow mo on my GoPro Hero 4( only 4x slow down though!).

Enjoy...it is Christmas after all

Top Comments

shabaz over 10 years ago +1

Purple smoke at night.. one sniff could be followed by pink elephants!! : )
DAB over 10 years ago +1

Ah yes, the smell of smoking capacitors in the morning. Brings back many fine memories of awesome component fails. DAB
mcb1 over 10 years ago +1

Nice video. We used to have them die after a lightning surge on equipment. One day perfectly fine, then some time later they would catch fire, and boy did they stink. We took to replacing them at any time…

Problemchild over 10 years ago in reply to jw0752

Not surprising as Selenium compounds are famed for their smell and apparently it binds to the proteins in your skin and stays with you for ages

Selenium or Friends ...not both!
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jw0752 over 10 years ago

A very nice experiment. We used to have trouble with selenium rectifiers and selenium surge protectors. One wiff and I would know where to look for the problem.
John
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Problemchild over 10 years ago in reply to shabaz

No Pink Elephants fortunately I had the extractor from the laser cutter on
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Problemchild over 10 years ago in reply to DAB

Not as purple as expected I think the White smoke diluted it all.
I was reminded to do it from an accidental destruction of a Tant' when I was prototyping on a breadboard (which it melted a bit ) and cool smoke came off it.
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Problemchild over 10 years ago in reply to mcb1

Yes tantalum caps are very high quality and everything but as shown they go up big style if overvolted or reverse biased.
I thought that the majority of the tantalum was from conflict mineral areas but in fact that accounts for only 1% of the material the majority comes from Australia. I can understand that for many applications it's just easier to replace them with normal Al Caps
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