Capacitor Charging/Discharging

Introduction:
Capacitors are electrical components that store energy in the electric field and can rapidly charge or discharge the energy if needed. In this lab we observed the charging and discharging of a capacitor in the circuit as is dumps it energy.

Procedure:
First, we found the values of the components when the circuit is charged and discharged in the circuits below.

We used this oscilloscope to perform the lab but unfortunately it only gave instantaneous voltage. So we illustrated the response of the capacitor charging and discharging.

 We used a stopwatch and a voltmeter to measure the voltage of the charging capacitor within 20 seconds.

Materials 1 Voltmeter and 1 stopwatch (optional), 1 oscilloscope, 2 variable resistors, 1 33 microfarad capacitor, cables.

For a charging time of about 20 seconds the voltage was 11 volts. The discharge time was about 2 sectonds.

Leakage Resistance:

Error calculation:

This was how the discharging graph should have appeared over time.

Conclusion:
The lab demonstrated the rapid discharge rate of a capacitor and the reasonable energy storage that can be achieved with the correct circuitry. The experiment was valid and the leakage resistance was about 10 times the charging resistance. This was the same ratio of the charging to discharging times of the capacitor.