“I have learned identifying components back in college. I was always curious as a kid, and had explored what was inside my toys. Back there in my college i was learning about the things i had seen inside my toys. Lets learn about them in the most simple way…..”
Capacitor is a storage device in electronics. It stores charge in it, we could all think of it as a Battery with small capacity. You can actually charge a capacitor by directly connecting the 9V battery to the capacitor terminals. This in turn will charge the capacitor and now connect a LED to the capacitor without a battery and notice the LED turns on just for an instance. This happens cause the amount of charge stored is very less.
The capacitor is often used to introduce a time-delay in a circuit. The Capacitor allows the same amount of current to flow through it but it charges itself which in turn causes a time delay in the circuit.
Let’s take a 9V battery and connect it to turn on a Light-Emitting Diode (LED). If you connect the battery directly to the LED, the huge amount of current will flow through the LED! Much more that the LED can handle. So the LED will become hot and burn in a fraction of a second. So how do we save the LED? Put a resistor in series with the LED as shown in the circuit diagram (To read schematic diagram click here), in this way you can control how much current is going through the LED. And in this case the the resistor is called the current limiting resistor.
It’s commonly used for removing noise, or making the supply voltage of a circuit more stable.
How does a Capacitor work?
A Capacitor can only store electrons. A capacitor is much simpler than a battery, as it can’t produce new electrons.
lets have a look at the figure, the terminals connect to two metal plates separated by a non-conducting substance, or dielectric. You can easily make a capacitor from two pieces of aluminum foil and a piece of paper/wood. It won’t be a good capacitor considering storage capacity, but it will behave as a capacitor.
What are the different types of Capacitors?
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