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

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!

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

No Pink Elephants fortunately I had the extractor from the laser cutter on

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.

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