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Report for Experiment #18 RC Circuits

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Report for Experiment #18 RC Circuits 10/24/17Introduction The purpose of this lab was to study a new circuit element, the capacitor, and its function in a circuit. Capacitors essentially store ch... arge, and their geometrical design allows them to separate charge by polarity. Once the stored charge is released, the energy can be reclaimed and made useful by other circuit elements. Due to the nature of energy charging and discharging in capacitors, this circuit element introduces time-varying currents. Two capacitors in parallel have capacitances that add together whereas capacitors in series have capacitances that act like resistors in parallel. The overall goals of this experiment were to measure the relationship between voltage and current in an RC circuit, to measure tau or the time constant in an RC circuit, and to develop an intuition for the time-varying nature of the current in an RC circuit. Investigation 1 In this investigation, the change in voltage between the resistor and capacitor was studied. The power supply was first connected to a 0.1 F capacitor with a 1k resistor and a switch in series. The power supply was set to 6.0 V and checked with the voltmeter. The closest multimeter reading obtained was 6.005 V. The figure below shows the setup of the circuit with the multimeters to measure voltage connected in parallel, and the power source represented by the +/- element. Figure 1: Circuit set-up The capacitor was discharged before being connected into the circuit. When the switch was flipped, the voltage reading across the resistor was recorded every 10 seconds for 5 minutes. The capacitor was discharged again and the experiment was repeated with respect to the voltage across the capacitor. The raw data for this experiment is in Appendix A. [Show More]

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