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Purpose: to illustrate the charging and discharging characteristics of a capacitor.
Learning Goals: Student will be able to calculate RC time constants, determine resistance, capacitance, charge time, or circuit voltages using RC circuit variables.
Learning Resources
Questions:
1. Describe the Basic function of a capacitor.
2. An older term for capacitor you may come across is a ______________
3 Describe the Basic construction of a capacitor.
4. What is a Dielectric.
5. What is the current the flows into a capacitor is called?
6. What is the unit used to measure capacitance?
7. What factors effect the capacitance of a capacitor?
Questions:
8. What is the unit used to measure capacitance
9. How is the RC time constant calculated.
10. What is the unit of the RC time constant.
11 After one time constant what is the capacitor voltage.
12. After how may time constants is a capacitor is considered fully charged.
13. If a capacitor is fully charged after 3.5 seconds what is the time constant for that RC circuit.
14. If the circuit in Question 13 has a 10000 ohm resistor what is the capacitors value.
Additional Resources
Single Resistor Capacitor youtube
Activity:
Connect a Resistor and capacitor across the +5 and gnd terminals of the Arduino.
Connect the midpoint of the circuit between the resistor and capacitor to an analog input of the Arduino.
Write a Sketch that reads the analog input and outputs to the serial monitor. (analog read serial will work for this)
Upload and run the sketch when the analog read value has stopped changing short the leads of the capacitor together to watch the pattern again.
Adjust the resistor and capacitor sizes so you can clearly see the charge effect.
Challenge:
Design and build a circuit and program that will make measurements calculate the value of an unknown capacitor.
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