A battery is a store of electro-chemical energy it releases as electricity on demand. We know that well enough by now, but what is a capacitor in simple terms? Well the best answer is a capacitor cannot produce electrons as a battery does. It can only store them, but it does that particularly well.
Anything That Stores Energy is a Battery, Actually
We pondered over what is a capacitor at the start of this post, but here we are talking about batteries again! Well the truth is flow batteries and lead batteries are miles apart too in terms of their technology. But we call both ‘batteries’ because they store energy and supply electrons.
What is a Capacitor – What It Does in More Detail
The bits of capacitors we can see on circuit boards are actually their containers and terminals, because the active components are inside them. The two terminals connecting them to circuit boards also join to separate internal metal plates. This would complete a circuit if the plates touched each other, but they do not.
Instead, they have a non-conductive substance between them breaking this connection. The industry calls this separator a dielectric. This could be almost anything, although in practice capacitor manufacturers match dielectrics to capacitor function.
Ceramic, cellulose, mica, mylar, porcelain, teflon and even air are some of the commonest non-conductive dielectric materials. The choice of the material dictates a capacitor’s application. For example, some are ideal for high-voltage purposes, while others suit high frequencies perfectly.
Future Posts on This Intriguing Topic
We’ll write a little more about what a capacitor is, and how it works next. Then we’ll delve into capacitor history for a while. We hope that intrigues you, and you keep coming back to learn more about batteries and energy storage.
More Information
Cloud-Based Battery Analytics Finds Faults
