 Hi today we'll be learning about capacitors. So you might have seen capacitors like this if you ever disassemble any of your electronics or perhaps you've heard about something called supercapacitors in the news. Supercapacitors are hyped to basically revolutionize power storage and that's what capacitors do, they store power. Just like a water tank would store water, a capacitor stores electrical charge. Now wait you might be wondering don't batteries store electrical charges as well and yes capacitors are basically like micro batteries but unlike batteries they can be charged and discharged extremely quickly. Now one of the reasons they can charge and discharge really quickly is because they have a much smaller capacity than batteries. Next let's dive a little bit deeper and actually understand how capacitors work. Firstly we must understand that capacitors capacity is measured by something called capacitense. Now the unit for capacitance is farads. Capacitors are literally built by just using two metal plates that are separated by a small air gap. Literally that's it, it's that simple and by using this equation over here we can understand that increasing the surface area of the two metal plates or decreasing the distance between the two metal plates will increase the capacitance of our capacitor. We could also add a non-conductive material between the two plates of a capacitor. This non-conductive material is called a dielectric and adding it effectively increases the capacity or capacitance of our capacitor. Let's quickly do a demo to understand how capacitors work. Okay so we're going to do a very simple circuit just to see how capacitors can be charged and how they can be discharged using a simple LED. So that's it, that's our circuit. The circuit's very straightforward in the sense that you can either charge the capacitor so the switch is flipped down to this point like so then the capacitor will be charging and the LED won't be activated but if you flip the switch to the other direction then what will happen is that your LED will be running from the capacitor. So let's go ahead and actually test this out and see what it looks like. So the wiring is done, it's very straightforward just like the circuit. Let's charge the capacitor, capacitor is charged, let's discharge the capacitor and capacitor is charged slowly. So yeah the capacitor has a tiny capacity that's why it can only sustain the LED for a short amount of time but as you can see the capacitor came to use in many circuits like we discussed now. So next let's talk about some of the use cases of a capacitor. The first use case of a capacitor is to smooth out a power source. Now imagine you're converting AC voltage into DC voltage by using something called a rectifier. The rectifier will give you a DC voltage signal that looks like this. As you can see there are quite a few gaps in the DC voltage signal and if this power is being passed down to your circuit you will have gaps in power as your circuit runs. Now if you want to rectify this and smooth this out what you can do is use a capacitor and the capacitor will basically discharge and provide power during these voltage gaps. So basically fill in these voltage gaps and give you a signal a lot more stable that looks something like this. Capacitors can also be used as DC voltage filters. When wired up in series circuits capacitors are only conductive while they're charging that means as soon as they finish charging they become non-conductive basically blocking DC voltage flow. Lastly capacitors like these can be used as timers. Capacitors can trigger other circuits to activate when the capacitor reaches a certain voltage level. By adding a resistor to the capacitor we can control how fast or slow a capacitor charges and in turn how quickly the capacitor activates the other circuit making it an effective timer. Let's quickly discuss the four types of capacitors. The electrolytic capacitor like the one I'm holding here is the most common type of capacitor. These capacitors are a little bit different because unlike traditional capacitors they replace one of the capacitor plates with this electrolytic fluid. What this allows the capacitor to do is be a lot cheaper and also have higher capacities. A downside to this is that they typically have slightly lower lifespan than capacitors like the fall capacitors. Now fall capacitors are great because they have longer lifespans like I mentioned and they use a traditional two-plate design. However fall capacitors tend to be a lot more expensive. Next we come to the ceramic capacitor. The ceramic capacitor can actually handle much higher voltages and also tends to have a slightly longer lifespan. However one downside with ceramic capacitor is that it's usually smaller in capacity and it's pretty bad for audio related circuits. Lastly we come to the tantalum capacitor. These look like ceramic capacitors but A are polarized that means the polarity matters and B they tend to have a much higher capacity than ceramic capacitors. So now you've learned what capacitors are, how they work, the types of capacitors and how you can use them in your next project. If you have any questions you can drop them down in the comments below. If you like this video you can like it and if you're new subscribe for more tutorials like this do subscribe. Thanks for watching.