Question

What is the working of parallel plate capacitor

Answer 1

A parallel plate capacitor is an set of two metal plates connected parallely separated from each other by some distance/space. A dielectric medium occupies the gap between the plates. The dielectric medium can be air, vacuum or some other non conducting material like mica, glass, paper wool, electrolytic gel and many others.The dielectric does not allow the flow of electric current through it due to its non-conductive property. However, the atoms of the dielectric material get polarised under the effect of electric field of the applied voltage source, and thus there are dipoles formed due to polarisation due to which, a negative and positive charge get deposited on the plates of a parallel plate capacitor.A parallel plate capacitor behaves as open circuited when we connect a DC source across it, while it acts as a short circuit when we connect an AC source to it. The said property of a parallel plate capacitor makes it suitable for filtering of harmonics from AC supply