Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Capacitor types
Summary
Capacitors are manufactured in many styles, forms, dimensions, and from a large variety of materials. They all contain at least two electrical conductors, called plates, separated by an insulating layer (dielectric). Capacitors are widely used as parts of electrical circuits in many common electrical devices.
Capacitors, together with resistors and inductors, belong to the group of passive components in electronic equipment. Small capacitors are used in electronic devices to couple signals between stages of amplifiers, as components of electric filters and tuned circuits, or as parts of power supply systems to smooth rectified current. Larger capacitors are used for energy storage in such applications as strobe lights, as parts of some types of electric motors, or for power factor correction in AC power distribution systems. Standard capacitors have a fixed value of capacitance, but adjustable capacitors are frequently used in tuned circuits. Different types are used depending on required capacitance, working voltage, current handling capacity, and other properties.
While, in absolute figures, the most commonly manufactured capacitors are integrated into dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and other device chips, this article covers the discrete components.
A conventional capacitor stores electric energy as static electricity by charge separation in an electric field between two electrode plates. The charge carriers are typically electrons, The amount of charge stored per unit voltage is essentially a function of the size of the plates, the plate material's properties, the properties of the dielectric material placed between the plates, and the separation distance (i.e. dielectric thickness). The potential between the plates is limited by the properties of the dielectric material and the separation distance.
Nearly all conventional industrial capacitors except some special styles such as "feed-through capacitors", are constructed as "plate capacitors" even if their electrodes and the dielectric between are wound or rolled.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.