Amperites:
If it's any consolation........I ripped apart a junk microwave Tuesday night
and took the rectifier block out and brought into the test lab here at work.
We hooked it up to our trusty underground cable testing machine and
proceeded to cook it for almost 60 hours at 8kV (AC), 4 amps. They got warm
(ok, HOT, 75 deg. C) but didn't fail. This morning we hooked it up to our
ever ready cable thumper (impulse generator) and set the computer to
automatically step up the thumps starting at 1kV and going to failure. The
thumps are IEEE standard from back in the days when we used to impulse test
cables (with deregulation we've gone to pitching the cable in the ditch and
not looking back). The unit failed gloriously at the 5th 37kV impulse.
Though this is not a representative test of monolithic rectifier strings it
did prove to me that at least this one had some integrity.
For what it's worth.......
Still scraping the black goo and plastic chunks off the test cubicle wall.
Gary K7FR
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