Originally posted by: Akira13
Originally posted by: LaLaLand
Hey can one of you geeks tell the rest of us what the heck these are for?
A capacitor is like a battery, but instead of using chemical energy, capacitors use charge stored on parallel plates (basic capacitors, anyway). You can use them when you want to provide massive amounts of current over a short time (like in camera flash bulbs). Traditional chemical batteries can't provide that kind of current, but capacitors can. I think that covers it...
Perfect explanation! But to clear things up a tad bit more. Think of a normal AA battery. You put it in...say, a remote control. Through a series of chemical reations, charge moves between the + and - terminal. Now this is fine and dandy in a remote, because the power isn't that great each time you push a button and thus this leads to the point that batteries are made for one thing in mind, to provide power over a long period of time. Of course the opposite of long period is short period and this is where the capacitor comes in. Like LaLa said, there are 2 tiny plates of equal surface area inside that tiny cylinder. What stems off are the + and - leads (even though some are non-polarized which is just a fancy term meaning that it doesn't matter which way it's placed, it will charge up either way).
Current is just the location of a point of charge of a period of time (dq/dt) so as current passes through the + lead of the capacitor, the plate attached to that lead inside charges up and there is a variance in net charge between the plates. As time progresses, the current builds up on that
one plate (I can't stress this enough that the charge doesn't "trickle" or whatever you want to call it) to the max voltage that the capacitor is rated for (in this case 2.5V), then the charge has nowhere else to go on the plate except to jump to the other plate. And you can imagine that this would create quite a lightshow if we could see what was going on inside! Now all this charge quickly discharges the plates and brings them back to neutrality and all th current is sent off through the - lead back on its merry way through the rest of the circuit where the process gets repeated until the circuit is shut off or you run out of power.
If anybody has any other questions regarding electrical components, ask away, I'm studying digital circuitry so I can assist with K-Maps, MUX's, Inverters, Gates, Adders, and the like. Have fun ! Just please don't ask me about Flip-Flops! *shutter*
LOL! And to think I just bought a 1 Farad stiffening capacitor for my car audio system! Damn who needs what you got one this tiny ! You can chain like 500 of those suckers together in a shoebox! (Al kidding aside), it won't matter much since once those 16V-24V of the car battery reaches those caps, needles you say, "sparks wil be 'a-flyin"!