DC link electrolytic capacitors are widely used in various PWM power converter system, such as adjustable speed driver(ASD) or DC/DC converter. Electrolytic capacitors, which is the most of the time affected by aging effect, plays a very important role for the power electronics system quality and reliability. This objective of this paper is to propose a improvement method to detect the rise of equivalent series resistor(ESR) in order to realize the online failure prediction of electrolytic capacitor for DC link of PWM power converter. The ESR detection scheme is based on the determination of the electrolytic capacitor AC losses calculated from voltage/current measurement using AC coupling. Therefore, the preposed online failure prediction method has the merits of easy ESR computation and circuit simplicity compare with BPF method. Simulation results show the veridity of the proposed on-line ESR estimation method.