Today we will be talking about Capacitors and Capacitive Circuits (to make this easier to understand, we focused more on the parallel aspects of capacitors). We learned how capacitors are voltage based, they they can charge and discharge, and we even learned about the new value for Capacitors, F (named after Faraday, capacitors are normally either in nanofaraday or microfaraday)
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| A few capacitors |
We began the class by looking at different types of capacitors, including what the capacitor looks like on the inside, as Prof. Mason was kind enough to remove the blue shell that our typical class capacitors had, to show us that it is basically two different sheets placed parallel (very close, but not necessarily touching each other). The green one on the far right is our superconductors due to the fact that it had a lot more capacitance than the our standard capacitance.
Derivation of Capacitance vs A and d
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| How a capacitor operates |
Since we know how the capacitor looks like (two parallel sheets), we can then use our former knowledge about electric field, and find a relationship between the electric field, the distance, and the voltage. We find that the voltage is directly proportional to both the electric field and the distance, yielding the equation V=Ed
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| How not to set up the capacitor |
On a side note, Prof. Mason showed us that capacitors are not like resistors at all, and can really only go one way. If a capacitor is set to a reverse polarity (as shown in the picture) it can overload and eventually explode
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| An exploded capacitor |
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| More derivation on capacitance |
Back onto showing relationships, once we found the relationship between charge, capacitance and voltage, we could then find potential energy of a capacitor
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| Using epsilon to understand more on capacitance |
We then took a familiar topic, epsilon, or the permeability of free space, and applied it to capacitance as well, saying that with area and distance, epsilon is also important as to finding capacitance.
We then also took an understanding of how epsilon naught, or the constant 8.854x10^-9 came to be
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| An mini-lab with dielectric |
In this mini lab we started to understand more about dielectrics by focusing on the dielectric of paper. We obtain these numbers by taking books of paper, and measured the capacitance, then calculated the dielectric for each instance
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| Another example problem |
Within this example, we looked for the distance, the charge, the potential energy and the charge density of the capacitor in question
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| Another example problem |
In this example problem, we focused on the capacitance of a car battery that would run solely on the charge that the capacitor stored.
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| Last example problem |
In this last example problem, we took into account the schematic of a simple capacitor, and calculated the dielectric in between two metal plats.
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