RPS

Regular Practice Sheets

Time: Hrs

RPS. No. 12

CAPACITORS
Why Are Capacitors Important?
The capacitor is a widely used electrical component. It has several
features that make it useful and important:

A capacitor can store energy, so capacitors are often found

in power supplies.
A capacitor has a voltage that is proportional to the charge (the
integral of the current) that is stored in the capacitor, so a
capacitor can be used to perform interesting computations in opamp circuits, for example.
Circuits with capacitors exhibit frequency-dependent behavior so
that circuits that amplify certain frequencies selectively can be
built.

What Is A Capacitor?
Capacitors are two-terminal electrical
elements. Capacitors are essentially two

conductors, usually conduction plates - but any two conductors -separated

by an insulator - a dielectric - with connection wires connected to the two
conducting plates.
Capacitors occur naturally. On printed circuit boards two wires
running parallel to each other on opposite sides of the board form a
capacitor. That's a capacitor that comes about inadvertently, and we
would normally prefer that it not be there. But, it's there. It has
electrical effects, and it will affect your circuit. You need to understand
what it does.
At other times, you specifically want to use capacitors because of
their frequency dependent behavior. There are lots of situations where
we want to design for some specific frequency dependent behavior.
Maybe you want to filter out some high frequency noise from a lower
frequency signal. Maybe you want to filter out power supply frequencies in
a signal running near a 60 Hz line. You're almost certainly going to use a
circuit with a capacitor.
Sometimes you can use a capacitor to store energy. In a subway car,
an insulator at a track switch may cut off power from the car for a few
feet along the line. You might use a large capacitor to store energy to
drive the subway car through the insulator in the power feed.
Capacitors are used for all these purposes, and more. In this chapter
you're going to start learning about this important electrical component.
Remember capacitors do the following and more.

Goals

Store energy
Change their behavior with frequency
Come about naturally in circuits and can change a circuit's behavior

You need to know what you should get from this lesson on
capacitors. Here's the story.

Given a capacitor,
o Be able to write and use the voltage-current relationship for
the capacitor,
o Be able to compute the current through a capacitor when you
know the voltage across a capacitor.
Given a capacitor that is charged,
o Be able to compute the amount of energy that is stored in the
capacitor.

Capacitors and inductors are both elements that can store energy in
purely electrical forms. These two elements were both invented early in
electrical history. The capacitor appeared first as the legendary Leyden
jar, a device that consisted of a glass jar with metal foil on the inside and
outside of the jar, kind of like the picture below. This schematic/picture
shows a battery attached to leads on the
Leyden jar capacitor.
Although this device first appeared in
Leyden, a city in the Netherlands sometime
before 1750. It was discovered by E. G. von
Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek.
Although it has been around for about 250
years, it has all of the elements of a modern capacitor, including:

Two conducting plates. That's the metallic foil in the Leyden jar.
An insulator that separates the plates so that they make no
electrical contact. That's the glass jar - the Leyden jar.

The way the Leyden jar operated was

that charge could be put onto both foil
elements. If positive charge was put onto the

inside foil, and negative charge on the outside foil, then the two charges
would tend to hold each other in place. Modern capacitors are no
different and usually consist of two metallic or conducting plates that are
arranged in a way that permits charge to be bound to the two plates of
the capacitor. A simple physical situation is the one shown at the right.
If the top plate contains positive charge, and the bottom plate
contains negative charge, then there is a tendency for the charge to be
bound on the capacitor plates since the positive charge attracts the
negative charge (and thereby keeps the negative charge from flowing out
of the capacitor) and in turn, the negative charge tends to hold the
positive charge in place. Once charge gets on the plates of a capacitor, it
will tend to stay there, never moving unless there is a conductive path
that it can take to flow from one plate to the other.
There is also a standard circuit symbol for a capacitor. The figure below
shows a sketch of a physical capacitor, the corresponding circuit symbol,
and the relationship between Q and V. Notice how the symbol for a
capacitor captures the essence of the two plates and the insulating
dielectric between the plates.

Now, consider a capacitor that starts out with no charge on either

plate. If the capacitor is connected to a circuit, then the same charge will
flow into one plate as flows out from the other. The net result will be
that the same amount of charge, but of opposite sign, will be on each
plate of the capacitor. That is the usual situation, and we usually assume
that if an amount of charge, Q, is on the positive plate then -Q is the
amount of charge on the negative plate.

The essence of a capacitor is that it stores charge. Because they

store charge they have the properties mentioned earlier - they store
energy and they have frequency dependent behavior. When we examine
charge storage in a capacitor we can understand other aspects of the
behavior of capacitors.
In a capacitor charge can accumulate on the two plates. Normally
charge of opposite polarity accumulates on the two plates, positive on one
plate and negative on the other. It is possible for that charge to stay
there. The positive charge on one plate attracts and holds the negative
charge on the other plate. In that situation the charge can stay there for
a long time.
That's it for this section. You now know pretty much what a
capacitor is. What you need to learn yet is how the capacitor is used in a
circuit - what it does when you use it. That's the topic of the next
section. If you can learn that then you can begin to learn some of the
things that you can do with a capacitor. Capacitors are a very interesting
kind of component. Capacitors are one large reason why electrical
engineers have to learn calculus, especially about derivatives. In the next
section you'll learn how capacitors influence voltage and current.
Voltage-Current Relationships in Capacitors
There is a relationship between the charge on a capacitor and the
voltage across the capacitor. The relationship is simple. For most
dielectric/insulating materials, charge and voltage are linearly related.
Q=CV
Where:

V is the voltage across the plates.

You will need to define a polarity for that voltage. We've defined the
voltage above. You could reverse the "+" and "-".

Q is the charge on the plate with the "+" on the voltage polarity
definition.
C is a constant - the capacitance of the capacitor.

The relationship between the charge on a capacitor and the voltage

across the capacitor is linear with a constant, C, called the capacitance.
Q=CV
When V is measured in volts, and Q is measured in coulombs, then C
has the units of farads. Farads are really coulombs/volt.
The relationship, Q = C V, is the most important thing you can know
about capacitance. There are other details you may need to know at
times, like how the capacitance is constructed, but the way a capacitor
behaves electrically is
determined from this one basic
relationship.
Shown to the right is a
circuit that has a voltage source,
Vs, a resistor, R, and a capacitor,
C. If you want to know how this
circuit works, you'll need to apply
KCL and KVL to the circuit, and
you'll need to know how voltage
and current are related in the capacitor. We have a relationship between
voltage and charge, and we need to work with it to get a voltage current
relationship. We'll look at that in some detail in the next section.
The basic relationship in a capacitor is that the voltage is
proportional to the charge on the "+" plate. However, we need to know
how current and voltage are related. To derive that relationship you need
to realize that the current flowing into the capacitor is the rate of
charge flow into the capacitor. Here's the situation. We'll start with a

capacitor with a time-varying voltage, v(t), defined across the capacitor,

and a time-varying current, i(t), flowing into the capacitor. The current,
i(t), flows into the "+" terminal taking the "+" terminal using the voltage
polarity definition. Using this definition we have:
ic(t) = C dvc(t)/dt
This relationship is the fundamental relationship between current
and voltage in a capacitor. It is not a simple proportional relationship like
we found for a resistor. The derivative of voltage that appears in the
expression for current means that we have to deal with calculus and
differential equations here - whether we want to or not.
Question
Q1 If the voltage across a capacitor is decreasing (and voltage and
current are defined as above) is the current positive of negative?

This derivative kind of relationship also has some implications for

what happens in a capacitor, and we are going to spend some time
exploring that relationship. Clearly, we need to understand what this
relationship implies, and then we need to learn how it affects things when
we write circuit equations using KVL and KCL.
We'll start by considering a time varying
voltage across a capacitor. To have something
specific, let's say that we have a 4.7f
capacitor, and that the voltage across the
capacitor is the voltage time function shown
below. That voltage rises from zero to ten
volts in one millisecond, then stays constant
at ten volts. Before you go on try to

determine what the current through the capacitor looks like, then answer
these questions.
Questions
Q2. Is the current constant in the time interval from t = 0 to t = 10 milli
seconds?

Q3. Is the current constant in the time interval from t = 10 milli seconds
to the last time shown?

If current is proportional to the time derivative of voltage, there is

only one time segment, from t = 0 to 1 millisecond, where the
voltage derivative is non-zero, so that's the only time there is any
current that is non-zero.
After one millisecond has elapsed, the voltage derivative goes to
zero, so there isn't any current then. If there isn't any current,
then the voltage stays constant because no charge is flowing in or
out. Remember, current is charge flow!
The voltage derivative is constant from t = 0 to 1 millisecond. If
that's true, then the current is constant in that period.
Now, you should be able to compute the current.

Energy in Capacitors
Storing energy is very important. You count on the energy stored in
your gas tank if you drove a car to school or work today. That's an
obvious case of energy storage. There are lots of other places where
energy is stored. Many of them are not as obvious as the gas tank in a car.
Here are a few.

You're reading this on a computer, and the computer keeps track of

the date and time. It does that by keeping a small part of the
computer running when you think that the computer is turned off.
There's a small battery that stores the energy to keep the clock
running when everything else is turned off.
If you own a stereo or television that you have to plug into the wall
plug, then you should realize that the wall plug voltage becomes zero
120 times a second. When that happens, the system keeps running
because there are capacitors inside the system that store energy to
carry you through those periods when the line voltage isn't large
enough to keep things going!

Capacitors can't really be used to store a lot of energy, but there

are many situations in which a capacitor's ability to store energy becomes
important. In this lesson we will discuss how much energy a capacitor can
store.
Capacitors are often used to store energy.

When relatively small amounts of energy are needed.

Where batteries are not desired because they might deteriorate.
For larger power/short duration applications - as in power supply
filters, or to keep power up long enough for a computer to shut
down gracefully when the line power fails.

To calculate how much energy is stored in a capacitor, we start by

looking at the basic relationship between voltage and current in a
capacitor.
i(t) = C dv(t)/dt
Once we have this relationship, we can calculate the power
- the rate of flow of energy into the capacitor - by multiplying
the current flowing through the capacitor by the voltage across
the capacitor.

P(t) = i(t)v(t)

Given the expression for the power:

P(t) = i(t)v(t)

And given the expression for the current:

i(t) = C dv(t)/dt

We can use the expression for current in the power expression:

P(t) = (C dv(t)/dt) v(t)

We can recognize that power is simply rate of energy input.

P(t) = dE/dt = (C dv(t)/dt) v(t)

Now, the derivative of energy can be integrated to find the total

energy input.
P(t) = dE/dt = (C dv(t)/dt) v(t)

gives

Now, assuming that the initial voltage is zero (there is no energy

stored in the capacitor initially, we find that the energy stored in a
capacitor is proportional to the capacitance and to the square of
the voltage across the capacitor.
Ec = (1/2)CV2

The expression for the energy stored in a capacitor resembles

other energy storage formulae.

For kinetic energy, with a mass, M, and a velocity, v.

EM = (1/2)MV2

For potential energy, with a spring constant, K, and an elongation, x.

ESpring = (1/2)Kx2

Since the square of the voltage appears in the energy formula, the
energy stored is always positive. You can't have a negative amount
of energy in the capacitor. That means you can put energy into the
capacitor, and you can take it out, but you can't take out more than
you put in.

Power in to the capacitor can be negative. Voltage can be positive

while current is negative. Imagine a capacitor that is charged. You
could charge a capacitor by putting a battery across the capacitor,
for example. Then, if you placed a resistor across the capacitor,
charge would leave the capacitor - current would flow out of the
capacitor - and the energy in the capacitor would leave the
capacitor only to become heat energy in the resistor. When energy
leaves the capacitor, power is negative.

When you use capacitors in a circuit and you analyze the

circuit you need to be careful about sign conventions.
Here are the conventions we used, and these conventions
were assumed in any results we got in this lesson.

Frequency Dependent Behavior For A Capacitor

We start with a capacitor with a sinusoidal voltage across it.

where:

vC(t) = Voltage across the capacitor

iC(t) = Current through the capacitor
C = Capacitance (in farads)

We will assume that the voltage across the capacitor is sinusoidal:

vC(t) = Vmax sin(t)
Knowing the voltage across the capacitor allows us to calculate the
current:
iC(t) = C dvC(t)/dt = C Vmax cos(t) = Imax cos(t)
where Imax = C Vmax
Comparing the expressions for the voltage and current we note the
following.

The voltage and the current are both sinusoidal signals (a sine
function or a cosine function) at the same frequency.
The current leads the voltage. In other words, the peak of the
current occurs earlier in time than the peak of the voltage signal.
The current leads the voltage by exactly 90o. It will always be
exactly 90o in a capacitor.
The magnitude of the current and the magnitude of the voltage are
related:
Vmax/Imax = 1/ C

Now, with these observations in hand, it is possible to see that there

may be an algebraic way to express all of these facts and relationships.
The method reduces to the following.

If we have a circuit with sinusoidally varying voltages and currents

(as we would have in a circuit with resistors, capacitors and
inductors and sinusoidal voltage and current sources) we associate a
complex variable with every voltage and current in the circuit.
The complex variable for a voltage or current encodes the amplitude
and phase for that voltage or current.
The voltage and current variables can be used (using complex
algebra) to predict circuit behavior just as though the circuit were
a resistive circuit.

We need to do two things here. First, we can illustrate what we

mean with an example. Secondly, we need to justify the claim above. We
will look at an example first, and we will do two examples. The first
example is just the capacitor - all by itself. The second example will be
one that you have considered earlier, a simple RC low-pass filter.
Example 1 - The Capacitor
In a capacitor with sinusoidal voltage and currents, we
have:
where:

vC(t) = Voltage across the inductor

vC(t) = Vmax sin(t)

iC(t) = Current through the inductor

iC(t) = C Vmax cos(t) = Imax cos(t)

C = Capacitance (in farads)

We represent the voltage with a complex variable, V. Considering

this as a complex variable, it has a magnitude of Vmaxand and angle of 0o.
We would write:

V = Vmax/0o
Similarly, we can get a representation for the current. However,
first note:
iC(t) = C Vmax cos(t) = Imax cos(t) = Imax sin(t + 90o)
(Here you must excuse the mixing of radians and degrees in the argument
of the sine. The only excuse is that everyone does it!) Anyhow, we have:
I = Imax/90o = j Imax = jC Vmax
Where j is the square root of -1.
Then we would write:
V/I = Vmax/jC Vmax = 1/jC
and the quantity 1/jC is called the impedance of the capacitor. In the
next section we will apply that concept to a small circuit - one you should
have seen before.
Before moving to the next section, a little reflection is in order.
Here are some points to think about.

A phasor summarizes information about a sinusoidal signal.

Magnitude and phase information are encoded into the phasor.
Frequency information is not encoded, and there is a tacit
assumption that all signals are of the same frequency, which would
be the case in a linear circuit with sinusoidal voltage and current
sources.
We looked at a case where we encoded a signal Vmax sin(t) into a
phasor of Vmax/0o. That was completely arbitrary, and many others
would have encoded Vmax cos(t) into a phasor ofVmax/0o.
Phasors are intended only to show relative phase information, and it
doesn't matter which way you go.

Using Impedance

In the last section we began to talk about the concept of

impedance. Let us do that a little more formally. We begin by defining
terms.
A sinusoidally varying signal (vC(t) = Vmax sin(t) for example) will be
represented by a phasor, V, that incorporates the magnitude and phase
angle of the signal as a magnitude and angle in a complex number.
Examples include these taken from the last section. (Note that these
phasors have nothing to do with any TV program about outer space.)
vC(t) = Vmax sin(t)
is represented by a phasor V = Vmax/0o
iC(t) = Imax sin(t + 90o)
is represented by a phasor I = Imax/90o
va(t) = VA sin(t + )
is represented by a phasor Va = VA/
Next, we can use the relationships for voltage and current phasors
to analyze a circuit. Here is the
circuit.
Now, this circuit is really a
frequency dependent voltage divider,
and it is analyzed differently
in another lesson. However, here we
will use phasors. At the end of this
analysis, you should compare how
difficult it is using phasors to the
method in the other lesson.
We start by noting that the current in the circuit - and there is only
one current - has a phasor representation:

I = Imax/0o
We will use the current phase as a reference, and measure all other
phases from the current's phase. That's an arbitrary decision, but that's
the way we will start.
Next we note that we can compute the voltage across the capacitor.
VC = I/jC
This expression relates the current phasor to the phasor that represents
the voltage across the capacitor. The quantity 1/jC is the impedance of
the capacitor. In the last section we justified this relationship.
We can also compute the phasor for the voltage across the resistor.
VR = IR
This looks amazingly like Ohm's law, and it is, in fact, Ohm's law, but it is
in phasor form. For that matter, the relationship between voltage and
current phasors in a capacitor - just above - may be considered a
generalized form of Ohm's law!
Now, we can also apply Kirchhoff's Voltage Law (KVL) to compute the
phasor for the input voltage.
VIN = VR + VC = IR + I/jC = I(R + 1/jC)
You should note the similarities in what happens here and what
happens when you have two resistors in series.

If you have a resistor, R, and a capacitor, C, in series, the current

phasor can be computed by dividing the input voltage phasor by the
sum of R and 1/jC.
If you have two resistors in series (call them R1and R2), the current
can be computed by dividing the input voltage by the sum of R1and
R2.

Example
Consider a series circuit of a resistor and capacitor. The series
impedance is:
Z = R + 1/jC
That's the same as we showed just above. The impedance can be used to
predict relationships between voltage and current. Assume that the
voltage across the series connection is given by:
vSeries(t) = Vmax cos(t)
That corresponds to having a voltage phasor of:
V = Vmax/0o
We also know that the impedance establishes a relationship between the
voltage and current phasors in the series circuit. In particular, the
voltage phasor is the product of the current phasor and the impedance.
V=IZ
For our particular impedance, we have:
V = I*(R + 1/jC)
So, we can solve for the current phasor:
I = V / (R + 1/jC)
Now, we know the voltage phasor and we know the impedance so we can
compute the current phasor. Let us look at some particular values.
Assume:

R = 1.0 k

C = .1f = 10-7 f
f = 1 kHz, so = 2 103
Vmax = 20 v

Then:

ZR = 1.0 k
ZC = 1/(jC) = 1/(j2 103 10-7 ) = j 1.59 k

And, the total impedance is:

Z = ZR + ZC = (1.0 + j 1.59) k

This impedance value can also be expressed in polar notation:

Z = 1.878 /62o

Now, compute the current phasor:

I = V / (R + 1/jC)

Substituting values, we find:

I = V / Z = Vmax/0o / 1.878 /62o =20/0o / 1.878 /62o

I = V / Z = (20 / 1.878) /-62o = 10.65 /-62oamps

And, we need to examine exactly what this means for the current as a
function of time. But that isn't very difficult. We can write out the
expression for the current from what we have above.

iC(t) = 10.65 cos(t - 62o) amps

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