How Capacitors Work in Electronic Circuits

Video Transcript

" Hello! This is Ross on behalf of expertvillage.com. Capacitors store electrons they are like a battery and they hold a charge and release it later. Capacitors composed of two conductors separated by an insulator, no it is dielectric. Now you've heard of kitchen chemistry for, this is kitchen electronics. Aluminium foil is a conductor. Now we have two conductors separated by insulator, well air is an insulator. So once they do not touch this connect is a capacitor and the closer I get the plates of the conductor without touching, the more capacitance can be stored. The larger the plates are the larger the capacitance can be and it is measured in farads. Now, if you are really a big capacitor to use like for a super weapon for a laser the size of a football field for instance and they have made those and then you can charge a great amount of energy that can be released quickly. The different size capacitors have labels on them if they are big enough to have the labeling what they are, their farads. Smaller capacitors like the ceramic one here has a number on it and you need to learn the numbering scheme that it has and these would typically be picofarads let us say. The electrolytic capacitor has markings on it. This has a negative marking on the side this means this leads needs to be more negative than this lead. Otherwise it could blow up and this one is good for 250 volts and it is 0.22 microfarads. This one here is 250 microfarad, quite bigger and again this is polarity sensitive and it is electrolytic its construction if you like taking and rolling this up, we get a material in there that is also an insulator and so when you roll it up it does not touch the other part of the conductor and then you have a lead coming off of the inside part and the outside part and this can hold quite a bit of energy actually. "