Over the past several years, our industrial facility has experienced many electronics failures where the root cause has been capacitor failure due to electrolyte dry-out.  The problem has been seen in power supplies for PLC's, protective relays, and process control equipment installed in the later 1990's.

I began investigating a recent incident, and suddenly remembered all the issues around motherboards and computer power supplies a few years ago.  Our equipment is the same age as the failed computer equipment.  I found an interesting wikipedia article that mentioned an IEEE Spectrum article from February 2003, titled "Bad Capacitors Mucking Up Motherboards".

This article only dealt with the personal computer side if the issue.

The goal of this posting (which will be cross posted into relevant forums) is to determine the extent of industrial failures and to estimate an approximate window of when the bad equipment was installed.  This is due to the relative silence from the capacitor and equipment manufacturers on the issue.

The questions are as follows:

1. Has your facility experienced multiple failures with the root cause being bad capacitors causing voltage instability?

2. If yes to #1, what year was the device manufactured?

3. If yes to #1, what as the manufacturer (if it is appropriate to tell) or what was the equipment type.

Please also share any further information you may have on the subject.  We are looking to determine the extent of this phenomena and our exposure to future events; one event can cost our industry several M$'s.  Thanks in advance for any information.