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Electrolytic Capacitors



Ed Schweber (edschweb@ix.netcom.com)
Physics Teacher at The Solomon Schechter Day School, West Orange, NJ

Hi all:

I have a 1 microfarad capacitor lying around my lab that is labeled as
an "electrolytic capacitor." I never paid any attention to the electrolytic
part before. However, now that I have some new Pasco computer equipment I
have been trying to use these capacitors in an RC circuit lab.

With the capacitor wired in series with a 100 ohm resistor and a 6 volt
battery I get voltage-time graphs for the capacitor voltage that look like
the standard exponential graphs to my naked eye, but which cannot reasonably
be fit to an exponential curve using the Science Workshop curve fitting
feature. Likewise, if I try to plot the natural log of the voltage vs time,
I get another vaguely exponential curve rather than the straight line I
expected.

Is this somehow characteristic of electrolytic capacitors or does the
glitch lie elsewhere?

Thanks for any input.

Ed Schweber