Capacitors in Series & Parallel - Electronics Basics 20

hello again and welcome to the 20th episode of simply electronics basics today we're gonna take a look at series and parallel capacitors and the basic differences between how they work in both configurations first of all if you have seen this video you will find that the outcome of series and parallel capacitors are the exact opposite of series and parallel resistors if you haven't seen this video I'll leave the link in the description so let's first have a look and how capacitors work in parallel configuration on the screen is the most simple circuit I can make to demonstrate parallel capacitors I've basically got a 3 volt power supply and an LED which requires 3 volts at 20 milliamps and I've got capacitors in parallel I also have a switch on the circuit mini I can turn the circuit on and off when the switch is closed these capacitors charge up to the 3 volts and this LED gets powered when I open this switch breaking this DC power supply the capacitors will continue to provide current to the LED until the voltage of the capacitors is below the running voltage of the LED so let's have a look as you can see the LED slowly fades out now these capacitors are 100 micro farad capacitors this is the capacitance rating of each capacitor because these capacitors are in a parallel configuration like this the total capacitance is simply the sum of the capacitance of each capacitor in this case the total capacitance in this parallel configuration is 100 microfarads plus 100 microfarads the total capacitance here is 200 micro farad's so I've just changed the value of these capacitors you may pause the video to see if you can work out the total capacitance in this parallel configuration if you didn't pause the video the answer of course is 100 microfarads plus 500 micro farad's giving us an answer of 6 hundred microfarads okay now let's have a look at capacitors in a series configuration you can see here I have exactly the same circuit as below with the power source and the switch and the led but this time I actually have the capacitors across the LED in a series configuration rather than the parallel configuration on this circuit so in this case can you guess what the total capacitance is in this circuit well it is exactly the opposite to what we would expect with series resistors with these capacitors in series the total capacitance in this case because they are both equal is halved so the actual capacitance of this series capacitor configuration is 50 micro farad's but just in case there are different values of capacitors that aren't exactly the same there is a very easy equation which is exactly the same equation used to work out parallel resistances so the equation in this case is 1 over 1 over C 1 plus 1 over C 2 and so on and so on but we've just got the two capacitors so in this case the total capacitance here in this series configuration is equal to 1 over 1 over C 1 plus 1 over C 2 so in this case we use the equation as follows 1 over 1 over 100 plus 1 over 400 which gives us an answer of 80 or a total capacitance of 80 micro farad's so even though we're using higher value capacitors here because they are in a series configuration the capacitance is actually much lower and we can demonstrate this visually let's turn both circuits on given that the above circuit has less capacitance this means that the LED should fade much faster than the bottom circuit so let's have a look so that faded pretty quickly let's have a look at the bottom circuit you can see there there is a clear difference in the time it took for the LED to fade now if you didn't quite get there I've left a couple of links in the description for you to have a look at after this video plus you can also interact with this live circuit by clicking the link in the description look forward to more videos on capacitors and more videos on everything else as well so make sure you subscribe to this channel give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Simply Electronics

Views: 103,574

Rating: 4.9311447 out of 5

Keywords: electronics, basics, current, electric, tutorial, how, to, energy, power, circuit, bigclive, big, clive, bigclivedotcom, how capacitors work, capacitor calculator, capacitors in series vs parallel, parallel capacitors, capacitors in series, capacitors and resistors, capacitors in series formula, capacitors explained, capacitors in parallel, capacitors physics, capacitors in series and parallel, capacitors vs batteries, capacitors and capacitance

Id: z-Mrzw_QVNE

Length: 4min 44sec (284 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2016