Capacitance

Capacitance

In this activity, we created capacitors using two sheets of aluminum foil, separation distance (provided by sheets of paper). We carefully cut two square pieces of aluminum foil and measured the area to be 0.0316 m^2 for each. We then measured the thickness of a single page. We did this by measuring the thickness of 280 pages (making sure not to include the cover sheets and dividing the total number of pages by 2 since a single sheet has two "pages" front and back) and dividing by amount of sheets. We calculated that a single sheet measured 6.357E-2 m.

We connected a multimeter to the two sheets of foil via alligator clips. The positive end on one of the aluminum sheets and the negative end on the other aluminum sheet. We separated the two sheets of foil by a single sheet of paper and measured the capacitance with the multimeter. We did this again for 2, 10, and 15 sheets of paper and recorded the capacitance. Then we folded the aluminum sheets such that they had half of their original surface area (0.0158 m^2) and measured the capacitance again for 1, 2, 10, and 15 sheets of paper separation distance, respectively.

 When collecting data for capacitance, we pressed down on the pages so that there would be the least separation distance possible. That is, that the only separation distance is the thickness of the paper sheets, not of air or deformation in the pages which will create a higher separation distance and thus data with greater inaccuracy.

Here is the data we collected from our trials. We took this data and used excel to plot a Capacitance vs. Separation Distance graph as shown below. The blue curve corresponds to the data taken from the original foil surface area and the orange curve corresponds to half of the original surface area.

 The following observations were found to be true from the data we collected.