PRE-LAB QUESTIONS
Please complete the following questions before coming to the lab, and bring your answers with you to the lab:
1. What is the main purpose and function of a capacitor? Provide a practical example of how capacitors are used within circuits.
2. When we double the separation between capacitor plates, what happens to the capacitance, C?
3. What is the time constant of a series RC circuit, and what unit does it have? What about for a parallel RC circuit? Explain.
4. When building an RC circuit, does the polarity of the capacitor with respect to the voltage source need to be considered? You can find the answer to this within the lab manual along with specifics regarding our capacitors.
5. Within Microsoft Excel, if you wanted to take a column of over a thousand rows and apply a natural logarithm function to each row value, how would you go about doing that in an efficient manner? Write out the explicit command for the natural logarithm function in Excel along with the process for doing this quickly.
a. Note: Don’t worry about the version, the specific command will be given in the manual for the version you will work with.
Set yourself the following objectives for this lab:
- Learn the basic properties of a capacitor experimentally and theoretically
- Analyze circuits which have current/voltage changing in time
- Understand the meaning of a time constant and how to find it for half an initial voltage
- Discharge a capacitor in parallel to a resistor and find the cumulated charge through integration
- Charge a capacitor through a resistor in a series circuit and experimentally analyze the results
The following shows the value of all the questions in this lab:
| Laboratory 3, Question Grading Scheme | Totals | ||||
| Part 1 | Question 1 | Question 2 | Question 3 | Question 4 | |
| Points | /2 | /1 | /2 | /1 | /6 |
| Part 2 | Question 5 | Question 6 | Question 7 | Question 8 | |
| Points | /1 | /1 | /2 | /1 | /5 |
| Total umber of points in this lab | /11 | ||||
The following shows the value of all the tables and graphs in this lab:
| Laboratory 3, Results Grading Scheme | Totals | ||
| Part 1 | Results / Table | Graph | |
| Points | /3 | /2 | /5 |
| Part 2 | Results / Table | Graph | |
| Points | /1 | /3 | /4 |
| Total Number of Points in this Lab | /9 | ||