Capacitors are devices that consist of two parallel conducting plates separated by a small

distance either by air or an insulator. They temporarily store electrical energy and can release it
in a short amount of time which makes them an essential part in most circuits.

When an uncharged capacitor and resistor are connected in series to a voltage source, charge
will flow until the capacitor becomes fully charged, in which the charge stored on its plates is
given by

Q=CV (eq. 1)

Where C is the capacitance of the capacitor and V is the voltage. Once the voltage source is
removed, the charge on the capacitor returns to zero and the capacitor discharges. In
this paper, the non-steady electric field with resistor and capacitor will be discussed as well
as the relation of time with the potential drop and current across the resistor and capacitor. This
paper seeks to explain the ability of a capacitor to store charge and provide a potential
difference when completely charged and discharged and to determine experimentally from the
graph the time constant of the C circuit.

In this experiment, the objectives were to learn how parallel plate capacitors work, measure the
effective capacitances, and determine the voltage across capacitors in both series and parallel
combinations.