Capacitors and Capacitance

Capacitance-

Capacitance is  the ability of a capacitor to store the energy in the form of electric charge.  

 Or 

The capacitance is the storing ability of a capacitor. Unit of capacitance is  farads.

How to make a capacitor-

Most capacitors usually contain two electrical conductors. These conductors are separated by metallic plates. Conductors may be in the form of electrolyte, thin film, a sintered bead of metal etc.

When we give charge to a conductor, its potential increases. We see that for a conductor, the potential of the conductor is proportional to charge given to it.

q = charge on conductor

V = potential of the conductor. Therefore, the charge will be proportional to the potential, and we may write:

                                               q ∝ V

                                           Hence, q = CV

Where C is the proportionality constant or the capacitance of the conductor. If the value of C is large, the capacitor can store more ‘q’ and if the value of C is small, q will be small. Hence, this constant gives us a measure of the amount of charge that a capacitor can store.