Capacitors

Charging and Discharging Capacitors

Capacitors have the ability, like batteries in a way, to hold charge. In this activity, a capacitor was charged and discharged. LoggerPro software was used to record the potential change in real time and record the data.

The graph above shows the phase when the grey power supply was used to charge the capacitor. We can see that it reaches a max of about 4.6 V and does not go higher than that. This means that the capacitor is fully charged. The behavior of potential as a function of time is given by the equation 

This graph shows the capacitor becoming discharged. We can see that it has an exponential decay. The  behavior of this process is given by the equation V=(V_0)e^(-t/RC).