Day 15: Capacitors

Homemade Capacitors

For this experiment we used two pieces of aluminum foil and an old physics book to create a capacitor. The pages of the book acted as the separation distance between the "two plates" (i.e. sheets of aluminum foil). By connecting the two sheets to a multimeter we were able to measure the capacitance. As area remained the same the only changing factors were d (distance) and C (capacitance). We took three different measurements for 1, 10, and 20 pages. We graphed our results below and found there to be an inverse relationship between distance and capacitance. This means that as the distance between the plates increases the capacitance decreases. We also solved for Kappa for the first trial and got a value of 0.367, this is off by a factor of 10 from the accepted 3.5 kappa value for paper. 

Capacitors in Series and Parallel

For this experiment we were given two capacitors. We first measured the capacitance of each capacitor and noted it below. We next set up the capacitors in series and in parallel as seen above. After measuring the capacitance we came up with two conclusions. The first conclusion was that in parallel the capacitance of the two capacitors was simply the sum of their respective capacitance. This means that in parallel Ctot=C1+C2. The second conclusion we came up with is that in series capacitors add up inversely: 1/Ctot=1/C1+1/C2. This can be seen below.