4/28 Capacitors

After our pop quiz, we did the problem in class to find the correct solution. First, we had to make an assumption on the direction of the current. We found that since the bottom battery had a higher voltage than the battery in the middle, the middle battery would be overtaken and act basically as a resistor.

The above 3 pictures is from our experiment of the relationship between capacitors and the distance between the two plates. We found that the closer the plates, the higher the capacity. This made our graph an inverse function. The graph is shifted slightly over to the right to compensate for the fact that at 0 distance, the capacity is 0 because it forms a closed loop.

We measured the surface area of 2 pieces of thin foil and separated the 2 pieces of foil by a certain amount of pages. We measured the thickness of the pages and calculated the capacity of the capacitor formed by the foil. We found that we would need 3.55 miles of foil to replicate this exact experiment to yield 1 farad. 

We visualized the previous experiment by drawing it on the left. We calculated the capacity of 2 capacitors when they are arranged in series and when they are arranged in parallel. The bottom right is a separate problem. We were asked to find the equivalent capacity, the voltage of the battery, the total energy, and the charge at point 1 and point 2 of the circuit drawn in purple.