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RC Circuits Lab Report

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Experiment 5: RC Circuits

Abstract

The purpose of this lab is to learn and understand RC Circuits. An RC circuit is composed of at least one resistor and at least one capacitor. A capacitor is composed of two plates with either air or an insulator also known as a dielectric between the plates. We do not want the plates to be touching, because then we would only have a conductor. The insulator between the plates is also known as the dialectic, which affect how the capacitor will store charge. In an RC circuit, voltage will flow from the battery to the capacitor and through the resistor. When the capacitor is charging, the voltage across the battery is decreasing until the capacitor is fully charged. When the …show more content…

We used the average half time to calculate the time constant to be 5525 microseconds. Then we use the average time constant to calculate the capacitance to be 0.55 microfarads. The percent difference is also 9.5%, which implied that finding the capacitance through this method is valid.
For the second part of the experiment, we created a capacitor by using two sheet of aluminum foil with the same area and a wax paper. We inserted the wax paper, which is the dialectic, between the aluminum foils to create a capacitor. Then we connected the capacitor to the RC circuit. In this part, we need to find the half time, the time constant, and capacitance in order to calculate for the thickness of the wax paper, or distance between the plates. In order to solve for the distance, we used the formula C=, which k is the dialectic constant, is the permittivity of free space, A is the area, and d is the distance between the plates. We rearranged the formula do solve for distance, so we used the formula, d=We measured the length and width of the plate, so the area is the multiplication of the length and width of the area plate. After the calculations, we obtain 580 micrometers for the thickness of the paper while the theoretical thickness is 35 micrometers. The percent difference between the theoretical and calculated thickness of the wax paper is 180%, which is significant to indicate that this method does not validate the

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