Build an Analog ESR Meter

With Moving-Coil Meter

Precision

Build an Analog ESR Meter With Moving-Coil Meter Precision

I was always envious of my friend’s analog ESR meter that allowed him to check
and find bad capacitors while they were still in circuit. The particular meter he had
is no longer available, which meant doing some research to understand how they
worked and to come up with my own version.

First, What Is ESR?

ESR stands for the equivalent series resistance of a capacitor. ESR is frequency-
dependent, temperature-dependent, and changes as components age. It’s typically
important for ‘wet’ aluminum electrolytic capacitors used in power supplies to have
a low ESR.

The typical method used for measuring ESR is to supply the capacitor with a
known AC current (Icap) at some frequency where the capacitive reactance of the
capacitor is very low so that the ESR dominates. By measuring the resulting AC
voltage developed across the capacitor’s terminals (Vcap), the ESR can be
determined with Ohm’s law:

ESR = Vcap/Icap

Most of the designs I found worked along the same lines as the block diagram
shown in Figure 1. Going from left to right, there is an oscillator that supplies AC
voltage to be applied to the capacitor. Next, the AC signal is fed into an impedance
converter and detector. The detected signal is then rectified and buffered so that it
can drive the meter on the right of the diagram.

Figure 1: Block diagram of the ESR Meter.

Since the ESR meter is to be battery operated, the power supply circuit supplies
split rails for the operational amplifiers that will be used in the ESR meter. The
oscillator in most of the examples I looked at operated at 100 kHz to 150 kHz. The
driver used to reduce the impedance of the AC signal could be anything from a
transistor current boost, transformer, or paralleled logic gates. The detector was
usually back-to-back diodes. The detected AC signal is then rectified, amplified and
fed into a DC meter.

My Circuit
In the circuit I decided to build (Figure 2), I used several design elements from the
DIY examples I found on the Internet. For the oscillator and impedance converter, I
used a single 74HC14 that provides six inverters with hysteresis. One of the
inverters acts as a relaxation oscillator and the remaining five inverters operate as
the impedance converter. This part of the circuit came from Lawrence P. Glaister
VE7IT. His circuit and article can be found at http://ve7it.cowlug.org/esrmeter.html.

Figure 2: The schematic of the ESR Meter is composed of design elements from
various
DIY examples found on the Internet.
The detector portion of the ESR meter is the same as the detection circuit in the
commercial ESR meter built by Creative Electronics. Sadly, these meters are no
longer made.

Diodes D1 and D2 clip the top and bottom of the 100 kHz AC to one silicon junction
drop. This allows capacitors to be tested in circuit because any other silicon
junctions will not be forward biased by the relatively low AC signal. The low-level
AC signal is DC decoupled with C3 and amplified by two operational amplifiers,
with a voltage gain of 4.7 for the first amplifier and a gain of 10 for the second. This
provides an overall gain of 47 to the input of the absolute value circuit.

The absolute value circuit was taken from the Burr-Brown Application Bulletin
“Precision Absolute Value Circuits." The absolute value circuit had plenty of drive
for the 100 microamp meter I used.

This ESR meter operates of a single 9-volt battery. The plus, minus and ground
voltages needed for the operational amplifier are derived using the opamp voltage
follower with current boost shown in Figure 3.

Figu
re 3: This circuit turns a 9 V battery into a symmetric double 4.5 V power supply

Test and Operation

To test out the circuit, I built it up on a conventional bread board. BNC connectors
allow for easy monitoring of the various waveforms. Initially for testing I simply
looked at the signals with an oscilloscope instead of the 100 µA meter
(Figures 4 and 5).

Figure 4: The oscilloscope shows the output of the oscillator as well as the output
of the ESR meter while testing a 50 μF electrolytic capacitor.
Figure 5: This waveform dump from the oscilloscope shows the difference between
a capacitor
with a high ESR in blue and a capacitor with a low ESR in orange.
The circuit is wired on two prototyping perfboards (Figure 6). The smaller board on
the left is the circuit used to derive the plus, minus and ground references for the
op-amps. The larger perfboard is the ESR meter circuit and is held in place by the
nuts on the meter.
 Fi
gure 6: The circuit is simple enough to be built on prototyping board.
Even before I was able to package the meter into a case I used it to trouble shoot
our air conditioner by locating a bad motor capacitor (Figure 7).
 Figure 7: Even when it still was a breadboarded prototye the circuit proved
useful when checking the motor capacitor of an air conditioner.
The completed ESR meter is sufficiently portable so that it can be used remotely
and away from the work bench. Simple Post-It Note calibration was accomplished
with a handful of 2-Ω resistors (Figure 8).
 Fi
gure 8: Calibrating the meter is easily accomplished with a few
2-Ω resistors and a scrap of paper.
The ESR meter works like an ohm meter. Before measuring a capacitor, the leads
are shorted together and the knob is adjusted for a full-scale reading (zero ESR).
Rotating the knob fully counter clockwise turns the meter off with a switch.

(210017-01)

Editor's note: The complete article, "Simple Analog ESR Meter With Moving-Coil
Meter Precision," appears in the July/August edition of Elektor. Become an Elektor
Member today!

Questions or Comments?
Do you have technical questions or comments about this article? Email the author
at glydeck@aol.com or contact Elektor at editor@elektor.com.