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299758

Charging and discharging a capacitor through a DC circuit: “PHET” demonstration and data analysis

Article

Last updated: 28 Dec 2024

Subjects

-

Tags

Theoretical and Experimental Physics

Abstract

“PHET" simulator was an excellent remote-teaching tool during the “COVID-19" pandemic times. In this article, we use this simulator to demonstrate the charging and discharging processes of a capacitor via a DC circuit. A simple circuit consists of a battery, a resistor and a capacitor is exploited to explain the charging process by converting the battery's voltage into a stored electric energy inside the capacitor. After the full charging of the capacitor, the battery is removed and the stored energy is allowed to discharge through a resistive load. During both processes of charging and discharging, it is available to record the voltage across the capacitor and/or across the resistor as functions of time. Then, these values are used to obtain other related, to the capacitor, quantities. This work is appointed to the students at the early university levels in the faculties of science and engineering who have some difficulties to understand the basics of this experiment. Almost, the difficulties are due to the brief derivations of the principal equations in the physics textbooks. Therefore, detailed derivations of the whole relevant mathematical relations are presented, in this article, and are correlated to the generated results in this work. The evaluation of the simulated experiment and the detailed mathematical derivations as well as analyzing the obtained data would serve the deep understanding of the targeted experiment's aims.

DOI

10.21608/sjdfs.2023.198676.1091

Keywords

Capacitor, Charging, Discharging, Time constant, PHET simulation

Authors

First Name

Ahmed

Last Name

El-Tawargy

MiddleName

S.

Affiliation

Damietta

Email

a_tawargy@du.edu.eg

City

Damietta

Orcid

https://orcid.org/my

First Name

May

Last Name

Elshabaan

MiddleName

M.

Affiliation

New Damietta city, Damietta

Email

elshabaan@gmail.com

City

New Damietta

Orcid

-

Volume

13

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

42094

Issue Date

2023-06-01

Receive Date

2023-03-07

Publish Date

2023-06-01

Page Start

135

Page End

144

Print ISSN

2314-8594

Online ISSN

2314-8616

Link

https://sjdfs.journals.ekb.eg/article_299758.html

Detail API

https://sjdfs.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=299758

Order

299,758

Type

Original articles

Type Code

2,045

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Scientific Journal for Damietta Faculty of Science

Publication Link

https://sjdfs.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Charging and discharging a capacitor through a DC circuit: “PHET” demonstration and data analysis

Details

Type

Article

Created At

28 Dec 2024