magnetism

RC circuits

Today we examined how resistors and capacitors worked within a circuit. with a power source connected in series with a capacitor, and a light bulb we saw how the capacitor was able to charge or store energy within itself. we saw that when the power was initially turned on the light bulb was at max brightness and as time passed the light bulb dimmed until the capacitor was fully charged. when we discharged the capacitor we found that the discharge and the charge time were the same.



This is the set up of our capacitor in blue with a power supply and light bulb.

 

Then we evaluated the time it would take to charge two capacitors instead of one and we found that the time it took to charge was longer even though we predicted the time to be shorter. this makes sense because we are charging more capacitors making the charge time and discharge time longer.

This is the circuit we are going to set up inorder to measure the potential with respect to time using logger

electronics day 2

electronics day 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Capacitance

For our capacitance experiment we tried to find a relationship between the surface area of the plates and the distance apart the capacitors are from each other. to do this we used aluminum squares and a book to vary the size and distance. first we used a small square and measured the capacitance between 1, 10, 20, and 50 sheets of paper to get a relationship between capacitance and distance.

This is the book and how we measured the capacitance between papers. when we put the aluminum between pages we had to create tabs that popped out of the edge to hook on to the alligator clips. the hard part was getting the aluminum to not touch.

 

These are the results from our experiment were we were able to solve for the constant k within our derived capacitance equation which we found to be 6.58

Using this data we input it into the excel

 

From the data from excel we created a graphical representation of our results were we saw a parabolic curve where the slope of the curve stands for the constant of k.

 

When you reverse a capacitor, with enough voltage you can get an explosive reaction that could harm you.

here we looked at the capacitors in series and in parallel and found that they are opposite that of the resistors. when capacitors are in parallel they are added together and when in series they are added inversely.

this is just some of the examples used in determining the capacitance of a circuit.