High temperature polymer film dielectrics for aerospace power conditioning capacitor applications

Polymer dielectrics are the preferred materials of choice for capacitive energy-storage applications because of their potential for high dielectric breakdown strengths, low dissipation factors and good dielectric stability over a wide range of frequencies and temperatures, despite having inherently lower dielectric constants relative to ceramic dielectrics. They are also amenable to large area processing into films at a relatively lower cost. Air Force currently has a strong need for the development of compact capacitors which are thermally robust for operation in a variety of aerospace power conditioning applications. While such applications typically use polycarbonate (PC) dielectric films in wound capacitors for operation from −55 °C to 125 °C, future power electronic systems would require the use of polymer dielectrics that can reliably operate up to elevated temperatures in the range of 250–350 °C. The focus of this research is the generation and dielectric evaluation of metallized, thin free-standing films derived from high temperature polymer structures such as fluorinated polybenzoxazoles, post-functionalized fluorinated polyimides and fluorenyl polyesters incorporating diamond-like hydrocarbon units. The discussion is centered mainly on variable temperature dielectric measurements of film capacitance and dissipation factor and the effects of thermal cycling, up to a maximum temperature of 350 °C, on film dielectric performance. Initial studies clearly point to the dielectric stability of these films for high temperature power conditioning applications, as indicated by their relatively low temperature coefficient of capacitance (TCC) (∼2%) over the entire range of temperatures. Some of the films were also found to exhibit good dielectric breakdown strengths (up to 470 V/μm) and a film dissipation factor of the order of <0.003 (0.3%) at the frequency of interest (10 kHz) for the intended applications. The measured relative dielectric permittivities of these high temperature polymer films were in the range of 2.9–3.5.