Brigham Young University-Idaho Department of Mechanical Engineering

Lab #6
Capacitors

Jeff Anderson 3/15/2012

Introduction Purpose To show how capacitors are made To demonstrate how varying the physical parameters of a capacitor will affect its capacitance Further develop ability to use laboratory equipment

Equipment Polypropylene cylinder (prescription bottle) for dielectric Aluminum foil for plates Insulated wire for leads Electrical tape Glue stick Capacitance meter with leads Metric ruler Digital calipers Wire cutter/stripper Scissors

Procedure Using the calipers, measure and record the diameter and wall thickness of the cylinder Cut two equal sized strips of aluminum foil that are about one cm longer than the circumference of the cylinder and almost as long Glue one aluminum strip to the inside of the cylinder wall and the other on the outside, make sure they share the same area Measure and record the height of the aluminum sheets Cut and strip two pieces of the insulated wire to be used as leads Tape the leads to the plates and then wrap the whole thing in electrical tape Calculate the capacitance according to the following formula:

Where: C=capacitance in Farads =permittivity constant=8.854* =relative permeability=1 =dielectric constant

=height of the aluminum sheets =diameter of the cylinder in meters =thickness of the cylinder wall in meters Turn the range selector on the tester to a range just larger than your calculated value With the leads disconnected, adjust the coarse and fine tuning knobs to zero out the meter Attach the clips to the capacitor leads and read the actual capacitance off the dial Compare expected and actual values and calculate the percentage error

Schematic Diagrams Not Applicable

Experiment Data Expected Results Using the formula described below the capacitance was calculated as follows:

Where: C=capacitance in Farads =permittivity constant=8.854* =relative permeability=1 =dielectric constant=2.25 for our polypropylene cylinder =height of the aluminum sheets=.0685m =diameter of the cylinder in meters (preferably the average of inside and outside diameters near the center of the plates) =.04581m =thickness of the cylinder wall in meters=.00108m The resulting capacitance was 181.8 pF.

Measured Results The actual measured capacitance turned out to be 147 pF which is a -19% error from calculated results.

Discussion and Conclusions There was a significant amount of error in the construction of the capacitor in this experiment due to the non-uniform methods and crude materials that were employed. However, for many capacitor applications the error was acceptable, having been less than 20% from the calculated value. If paper had been used instead of plastic for the dielectric, the resulting capacitance would have been less since the dielectric constant of paper is much less than that of plastic. The dielectric constant is directly proportional to the capacitance. Since the two plates were not the same size, the average area was used, but since only the shared area counts towards capacitance, it may have been better to use the smaller of the two areas, this may help account for why the calculated value was so much higher than the actual. If no meter was available, then the time, current and voltage could be recorded during charging of the capacitor using a high value resistor so it would charge slow enough to get these readings on an analog meter and then these values could be used to calculate capacitance.