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Electrolytic capacitor (next to a pencil for scale)

Capacitors
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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: March 30, 2018.

Stare into the sky most days and you'll see some huge capacitors floating over your head.
Capacitors (sometimes known as condensers) are energy-storing devices that are widely used in
televisions, radios, and other kinds of electronic equipment. Tune a radio into a station, take a
flash photo with a digital camera, or flick the channels on your HDTV and you're making good
use of capacitors. The capacitors that drift through the sky are better known as clouds and, though
they're absolutely gigantic compared to the capacitors we use in electronics, they store energy in
exactly the same way. Let's take a closer look at capacitors and how they work!

Photo: A typical capacitor used in electronic circuits. This one is called an electrolytic capacitor
and it's rated as 4.7 μF (4.7 microfarads), with a working voltage of 350 volts (350 V).

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What is a capacitor?

Small mica capacitor in a transistor radio.

Photo: A small capacitor in a transistor radio circuit.

Take two electrical conductors (things that let electricity flow through them) and separate them
with an insulator (a material that doesn't let electricity flow very well) and you make a capacitor:
something that can store electrical energy. Adding electrical energy to a capacitor is called
charging; releasing the energy from a capacitor is known as discharging.

A capacitor is a bit like a battery, but it has a different job to do. A battery uses chemicals to store
electrical energy and release it very slowly through a circuit; sometimes (in the case of a quartz
watch) it can take several years. A capacitor generally releases its energy much more rapidly—
often in seconds or less. If you're taking a flash photograph, for example, you need your camera to
produce a huge burst of light in a fraction of a second. A capacitor attached to the flash gun
charges up for a few seconds using energy from your camera's batteries. (It takes time to charge a
capacitor and that's why you typically have to wait a little while.) Once the capacitor is fully
charged, it can release all that energy in an instant through the xenon flash bulb. Zap!

Capacitors come in all shapes and sizes, but they usually have the same basic components. There
are the two conductors (known as plates, largely for historic reasons) and there's the insulator in
between them (called the dielectric). The two plates inside a capacitor are wired to two electrical
connections on the outside called terminals, which are like thin metal legs you can hook into an
electric circuit.

The inside of an electrolytic capacitor

Photo: Inside, an electrolytic capacitor is a bit like a Swiss roll. The "plates" are two very thin
sheets of metal; the dielectric an oily plastic film in between them. The whole thing is wrapped up
into a compact cylinder and coated in a protective metal case. WARNING: It can be dangerous to
open up capacitors. First, they can hold very high voltages. Second, the dielectric is sometimes
made of toxic or corrosive chemicals that can burn your skin.

How an electrolytic capacitor is made from a Swiss roll of metal film with a dielectric in between.

Artwork: How an electrolytic capacitor is made by rolling up sheets of aluminum foil (gray) and a
dielectric material (in this case, paper or thin cheesecloth soaked in an acid or other organic
chemical). The foil sheets are connected to terminals (blue) on the top so the capacitor can be
wired into a circuit. Artwork courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office from US Patent
2,089,683: Electrical capacitor by Frank Clark, General Electric, August 10, 1937.

You can charge a capacitor simply by wiring it up into an electric circuit. When you turn on the
power, an electric charge gradually builds up on the plates. One plate gains a positive charge and
the other plate gains an equal and opposite (negative) charge. If you disconnect the power, the
capacitor keeps hold of its charge (though it may slowly leak away over time). But if you connect
the capacitor to a second circuit containing something like an electric motor or a flash bulb, charge
will flow from the capacitor through the motor or lamp until there's none remaining on the plates.

Although capacitors effectively have only one job to do (storing charge), they can be put to all
sorts of different uses in electrical circuits. They can be used as timing devices (because it takes a
certain, predictable amount of time to charge them), as filters (circuits that allow only certain
signals to flow), for smoothing the voltage in circuits, for tuning (in radios and TVs), and for a
variety of other purposes. Large supercapacitors can also be used instead of batteries.

Capacitors and capacitance

The amount of electrical energy a capacitor can store is called its capacitance. The capacitance of
a capacitor is a bit like the size of a bucket: the bigger the bucket, the more water it can store; the
bigger the capacitance, the more electricity a capacitor can store. There are three ways to increase
the capacitance of a capacitor. One is to increase the size of the plates. Another is to move the
plates closer together. The third way is to make the dielectric as good an insulator as possible.
Capacitors use dielectrics made from all sorts of materials. In transistor radios, the tuning is
carried out by a large variable capacitor that has nothing but air between its plates. In most
electronic circuits, the capacitors are sealed components with dielectrics made of ceramics such as
mica and glass, paper soaked in oil, or plastics such as mylar.
Variable capacitor in a radio tuning control

Photo: This variable capacitor is attached to the main tuning dial in a transistor radio. When you
turn the dial with your finger, you turn an axle running through the capacitor. This rotates a set of
thin metal plates so they overlap to a greater or lesser extent with another set of plates threaded in
between them. The degree of overlap between the plates alters the capacitance and that's what
tunes the radio into a particular station.

How do we measure capacitance?

The size of a capacitor is measured in units called farads (F), named for English electrical pioneer
Michael Faraday (1791–1867). One farad is a huge amount of capacitance so, in practice, most of
the capacitors we come across are just fractions of a farad—typically microfarads (millionths of a
farad, written μF), nanofarads (thousand-millionths of a farad written nF), and picofarads (million
millionths of a farad, written pF). Supercapacitors store far bigger charges, sometimes rated in
thousands of farads.

Why do capacitors store energy?

If you find capacitors mysterious and weird, and they don't really make sense to you, try thinking
about gravity instead. Suppose you're standing at the bottom of some steps and you decide to start
climbing. You have to heave your body up, against Earth's gravity, which is an attractive (pulling)
force. As physicists say, you have to "do work" to climb a ladder (work against the force of
gravity) and use energy. The energy you use isn't lost, but stored by your body as gravitational
potential energy, which you could use to do other things (whizzing down a slide back to ground
level, for example).

What you do when you climb steps, ladders, mountains, or anything else is work against Earth's
gravitational field. A very similar thing is going on in a capacitor. If you have a positive electrical
charge and a negative electrical charge, they attract one another like the opposite poles of two
magnets—or like your body and Earth. If you pull them apart, you have to "do work" against this
electrostatic force. Again, just like with climbing steps, the energy you use isn't lost, but stored by
the charges as they separate. This time it's called electrical potential energy. And this, if you've not
guessed by now, is the energy that a capacitor stores. Its two plates hold opposite charges and the
separation between them creates an electric field. That's why a capacitor stores energy.

Why do capacitors have two plates?

As we've already seen, capacitors have two conducting plates separated by an insulator. The
bigger the plates, the closer they are, and the better the insulator in between them, the more charge
a capacitor can store. But why are all these things true? Why don't capacitors just have one big
plate? Let's try and find a simple and satisfying explanation.

Suppose you have a big metal sphere mounted on an insulating, wooden stand. You can store a
certain amount of electric charge on the sphere; the bigger it is (the bigger its radius), the more
charge you can store, and the more charge you store, the bigger the potential (voltage) of the
sphere. Eventually, though, you'll reach a point where if you add so much as a single extra electron
(the smallest possible unit of charge), the capacitor will stop working. The air around it will break
down, turning from an insulator to a conductor: charge will zap through the air to Earth (ground)
or another nearby conductor as a spark—an electric current—in a mini bolt of lightning. The
maximum amount of charge you can store on the sphere is what we mean by its capacitance. The
voltage (V), charge (Q), and capacitance are related by a very simple equation:

C = Q/V

So the more charge you can store at a given voltage, without causing the air to break down and
spark, the higher the capacitance. If you could somehow store more charge on the sphere without
reaching the point where you created a spark, you would effectively increase its capacitance. How
might you do that?

Forget about the sphere. Suppose you have a flat metal plate with the maximum possible charge
stored on it and you find the plate is at a certain voltage. If you bring a second identical plate up
close to it, you'll find you can store much more charge on the first plate for the same voltage.
That's because the first plate creates an electric field all around it that "induces" an equal and
opposite charge on the second plate. The second plate therefore reduces the voltage of the first
plate. We can now store more charge on the first plate without causing a spark. We can keep on
doing that until we reach the original voltage. With more charge (Q) stored for exactly the same
voltage (V), the equation C = Q/V tells us that we've increased the capacitance of our charge
storing device by adding a second plate, and this is essentially why capacitors have two plates and
not one. In practice, the extra plate makes a huge difference—which is why all practical capacitors
have two plates.

How can we increase the capacitance?

It's intuitively obvious that if you make the plates bigger, you'll be able to store more charge (just
as if you make a closet bigger you can stuff more things inside it). So increasing the area of the
plates also increases the capacitance. Less obviously, if we reduce the distance between the plates,
that also increases the capacitance. That's because the shorter the distance between the plates, the
more effect the plates have on one another. The second plate, being closer, reduces the potential of
the first plate even more, and that increases the capacitance.

A dielectric increases the charge a capacitor can store by reducing the electric field between its
plates.

Artwork: A dielectric increases the capacitance of a capacitor by reducing the electric field
between its plates, so reducing the potential (voltage) of each plate. That means you can store
more charge on the plates at the same voltage. The electric field in this capacitor runs from the
positive plate on the left to the negative plate on the right. Because opposite charges attract, the
polar molecules (grey) of the dielectric line up in the opposite way—and this is what reduces the
field.

The final thing we thing we can do to increase the capacitance is to change the dielectric (the
material between the plates). Air works pretty well, but other materials are even better. Glass is at
least 5 times more effective than air, which is why the earliest capacitors (Leyden jars, using
ordinary glass as the dielectric) worked so well, but it's heavy, impractical, and hard to squeeze
into small spaces. Waxed paper is about 4 times better than air, very thin, cheap, easy to make in
large pieces, and easy to roll, which makes it an excellent, practical dielectric. The best dielectric
materials are made of polar molecules (ones with more positive electric charge on one side and
more negative electric charge on the other). When they sit in the electric field between two
capacitor plates, they line up with their charges pointing opposite to the field, which effectively
reduces it. That reduces the potential on the plates and, as before, increases their capacitance.
Theoretically, water, which is made of really tiny polar molecules, would make an excellent
dielectric, roughly 80 times better than air. Practically, though, it's not so good (it leaks and dries
out and changes from a liquid to ice or steam at relatively modest temperatures), so it's not used in
real capacitors.

Bar chart comparing the relative permittivities of 10 different dielectric materials.

Chart: Different materials make better or worse dielectrics according to how well they insulate the
space between a capacitor's plates and reduce the electric field between them. A measurement
called the relative permittivity tells us how good a dielectric something will make. A vacuum is
the worst dielectric and is given a relative permittivity of 1. Other dielectrics are measured relative
(by comparing them) to a vacuum. Air is roughly the same. Paper is about 3 times better. Alcohol
and water, which have polar molecules, make particularly good dielectrics.

How cloud capacitors cause lightning

Diagram showing how charge builds up inside a cloud and causes lightning

When clouds drift through the sky, ice particles inside them rub against the air and gain static
electrical charges—in just the same way that a balloon gets charged up when you rub it on your
jumper. The top of a cloud becomes positively charged when smaller ice particles swirl upward
(1); the bottom of a cloud becomes negatively charged when the heavier ice particles gather lower
down (2). The separation of positive and negative charges in a cloud makes a kind of moving
capacitor!

As a cloud floats along, the electric charge it contains affects things on the ground beneath it. The
huge negative charge at the bottom of the cloud repels negative charge away from it, so the ground
effectively becomes positively charged (3). The separation of charge between the bottom of the
cloud and the ground beneath means that this area of the atmosphere is also, effectively, a
capacitor.

Over time, enormous electrical charges can build up inside clouds. If the charge is really big, the
cloud contains an enormous amount of electrical potential energy (it has a really high voltage).
When the voltage reaches a certain level (sometimes several hundred million volts), the air is
transformed from being an insulator into a conductor, and electricity will flow through it as though
it were a metal wire, creating a giant spark better known as a bolt of lightning (4). The cloud
behaves like a flash gun in a camera: the huge electrical energy stored in its "capacitor" is
discharged in an instant and converted into a flash of light.

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On this website

Electricity
Electronics
Resistors
Transistors
On other sites

MagLab: Capacitor Tutorial: An interactive Java page that allows you to experiment with using
capacitors in a simple motor circuit. You can see from this how a capacitor differs from a battery:
while a battery makes electrical energy from stored chemicals, a capacitor simply stores electrical
energy for a limited time (it doesn't make any energy).
Books for older readers

Capacitors by R.P. Deshpande. McGraw-Hill Education, 2014. A very comprehensive reference

that introduces the science of capacitance, reviews the various different types of capacitors, and
looks at typical applications.
Capacitors: Theory, Types and Applications by Alexander L. Shulz. Nova Science, 2010. A good
short overview.
Electrical Power Capacitors by D.M. Tagare. Tata McGraw-Hill Education, 2001. Introduces the
concept of a capacitor, describes the various types, explains the design and manufacture of
capacitors, and also considers how capacitors will evolve in future.
Books for younger readers

Make: Electronics by Charles Platt. Maker Media, 2015. "Experiment 9: Time and Capacitors"
(p.75 of the printed book) introduces us to capacitors and how we can use them in timing circuits.
Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius by Robert E. Iannini. McGraw-Hill Professional, 2014.
Lots of reasonably simple, hands-on electronic projects suitable for teenagers and adults. Quite a
few of them use capacitors for timing or plain energy storage.
Videos
MAKE presents: The Capacitor: A great little 8-minute video introduction to capacitors from
Colin Cunningham of MAKE.
Capacitors: A-Z of electronics: A 5-minute animated introduction to the history of capacitors.
Articles

Go Ahead, Connect an Inductor and Capacitor and See What Happens by Rhett Allain, Wired,
May 11, 2016. A neat introduction to LC (inductor-capacitor) and LRC (inductor-resistor-
capacitor) circuits, and what they can do for you.
Can You Power a Phone With a Capacitor? by Rhett Allain, Wired, May 23, 2013. If capacitors
can store charge, can they power something like a cellphone? How big would a phone-powering
capacitor need to be?
Leaking Capacitors Muck up Motherboards by Samuel K. Moore and Yu-Tzu Chiu, IEEE
Spectrum, February 1, 2003. What happens when rogue capacitors with bad electrolytes run amok
on circuit boards?
Please do NOT copy our articles onto blogs and other websites

Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2008, 2017. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms
of use.

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Woodford, Chris. (2008/2017) Capacitors. Retrieved from

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/capacitors.html. [Accessed (Insert date here)]

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