21April2014

Capacitors in Series and Parallel 

The capacitors were placed in series and in parallel and the voltage was measured in order to determine a relationship between the configuration and voltage produced. 

We observed that the when the capacitors were placed in series they produced a voltage 0.618V given that the value for c1=1.03V and c2= 1.45V we found the relationship to be the product of the voltage over the sum of the voltage. 

But in parallel we found the total voltage to be 2.50V given the measured value of c1 and c2 we found when resistors are placed in parallel the relationship is the sum of the voltages. 

Homemade Capacitor 

In this experiment we used foil paper of a known area and sheets of paper in sets of 12 pages of a known thickness to create a capacitor in order to determine the relationship of the capacitor with the area of the conducting foil and the distance between them. We  can also determine the relative permittivity of the dielectric material with this relationship. 

The voltmeter was used in order to calculate the capacitance for a larger and smaller area of foil. 

For the larger area the capacitance was graphed verses the distance created with the paper. Considering that the area remained constant this graph indicated that the distance is inversely proportional to the capacitance. As the capacitance decreases the distance increases.

From our data set we can determine k which is the relative permittivity of the dielectric material between foil plates. From our first data point we determined k to be 3.49 for paper. Compared to the actual value of k for paper of 3.5 we found percent discrepancy to be 0.28%. This percent error indicated that our method of creating a capacitor was very effective. Thus our k value was very close to the actual value of k.