Simple self-charging battery offers power solutions for devices

A new type of battery combines negative capacitance and negative resistance within the same cell, allowing the cell to self-charge without losing energy, which has important implications for long-term storage and improved ...

Protein defect leaves sperm chasing their tails

A team led by researchers from Osaka University identify a protein required for electrical signal sensing, which, when defective, causes sperm to swim in circles.

Researchers capture an image of negative capacitance in action

For the first time ever, an international team of researchers imaged the microscopic state of negative capacitance. This novel result provides researchers with fundamental, atomistic insight into the physics of negative capacitance, ...

'Negative capacitance' could bring more efficient transistors

Researchers have experimentally demonstrated how to harness a property called negative capacitance for a new type of transistor that could reduce power consumption, validating a theory proposed in 2008 by a team at Purdue ...

page 1 from 3

Capacitance

In electromagnetism and electronics, capacitance is the ability of a capacitor to store energy in an electric field. Capacitance is also a measure of the amount of electric potential energy stored (or separated) for a given electric potential. A common form of energy storage device is a parallel-plate capacitor. In a parallel plate capacitor, capacitance is directly proportional to the surface area of the conductor plates and inversely proportional to the separation distance between the plates. If the charges on the plates are +q and −q, and V gives the voltage between the plates, then the capacitance is given by

The SI unit of capacitance is the farad; 1 farad is 1 coulomb per volt.

The energy (measured in joules) stored in a capacitor is equal to the work done to charge it. Consider a capacitor of capacitance C, holding a charge +q on one plate and −q on the other. Moving a small element of charge dq from one plate to the other against the potential difference V = q/C requires the work dW:

where W is the work measured in joules, q is the charge measured in coulombs and C is the capacitance, measured in farads.

The energy stored in a capacitor is found by integrating this equation. Starting with an uncharged capacitance (q = 0) and moving charge from one plate to the other until the plates have charge +Q and −Q requires the work W:

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA