aRCHIT PHY
aRCHIT PHY
KHARGHAR
PHYSICS
INVESTIGATORY PROJECT
PRINCIPAL
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
3
INDEX
4 INVESTIGATORY EXPERIMENT 6
1. OBJECTIVE
2. REQUIREMENTS
3. THEORY
5 PROCEDURE 8
6 CALCULATION 11
7 CONCLUSON 12
PRECAUTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
4
An R-C circuit is a circuit containing a resistor and capacitor in series to a power
source. Such circuits Find very important applications in various areas of science
and in basic circuits which act as building blocks of modern technological devices.
It should be really helpful if we get comfortable with the terminologies charging
and discharging of capacitors.
INVESTIGATORY EXPERIMENT
AIM:- To verify that 63% charge is stored in a capacitor in a R-C circuit at its
time constant and 63% charge remains when capacitor is discharged and hence plot
a graph between voltage and time
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Applying KIRCHHOFF’S LAW in the above circuit during charging i.e. Capacitor
is connected to battery
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Therefore the required expression is:-
[Note: This is the charging equation only, for discharging equation proceed the
same way but only remove E from Kirchhoff law equation]
Thus, equation for discharging
i.e. the voltage on capacitor at time ‘T = RC’ becomes 63% of the max voltage,
which means 63% of total charge has been stored in the capacitor.
This product of R and C has been given a new name, i.e. time constant and is
denoted by τ, which mean for any capacitor in RC circuit 63% of total charge is at
time constant.
In my experiment I have used a 100µF capacitor and 1 MΩ resistor thus,
Time constant(τ) = 100 x 10-6 x 106 = 100 sec
PROCEDURE:-
➢ Now take multimeter leads and place them in the two terminals
➢ Now take the Battery and its terminal across the terminal of the
capacitor and start the stopwatch. Note the readings at 20sec intervals
and write them down: [NOTE: - Reading the previous statement
could be astonishing as it says that measure voltage at 20sec interval
but one could question that current move at very high speed so how
could one measure the changing readings! But believe me it wasn’t an
easy task but since the voltage depends on reciprocal of exponential
function and as time passes by the changing readings will get slowed
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down and even after infinite time the capacitor could not be charged
up to max voltage. Also, since its time constant is 100sec which is
quite practical to measure at and hence this experiment is very much
justified.
➢ Now let the capacitor be charged up to 460 secs because then it will
become 99.99% charged [since we have a limited time and we can’t
wait for infinite time for it to charge completely!] . Now remove the
battery and now attach a wire in place of the battery terminals and
again note the multimeter readings changing and record them.
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OBSERVATION
S Multi-meter reading while Multi-meter Time
No. charging (in V) reading while (in S)
discharging (in
V)
1 0 8.95 0
2 1.65 7.34 20
3 3.02 6.00 40
4 4.11 4.91 60
5 4.90 4.03 80
6 5.69 3.30 100
7 6.72 2.21 140
8 7.00 1.54 180
9 8.12 0.74 250
10 8.40 0.43 300
GRAPH
Plot of voltage vs time
• For Charging
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• For Discharging
CALCULATION
At τ =100s, during charging of capacitor the voltage on capacitor is 5.69 volt as itis
observed in the experiment. Now using the charging formula:
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CONCLUSION
Hence it is verified experimentally that 63% charge is there on capacitor
after time constant during charging and 63% charge is lost at time constant
during discharging.
PRECAUTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• www.Wikipedia.com
• Physics NCERT book for class XII
• Google search engine
• www.youtube.com
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