Electronics Question: Capacitors?

F

Frog Man

New member
I've heard of resistive capacitance ut I cant figure out how to make it work. basically I want to form a circuit that will slowly discharge a 4700uf capacitor. It's so large it has a long delay on it's own but I need a really long one.

Is it just putting a resistor in series with it or what, nothing works??

Thanks,
jake T
 
4700 µF and 1 MΩ is a time constant of 4700µ x 1 M = 4700 seconds or 78 minutes.

So a 1 MΩ resistor across the cap will take several hours to discharge. However, electrolytic caps tend to have high internal leakage, and depending on the quality of the capacitor, that leakage resistance could be be substantially less than 1 MΩ.


"long delay on it's own" – I think this means the discharge due to the internal resistance. In that case, you cannot make it longer, as that resistance is part of the construction of the capacitor.

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