Many of us have grabbed two pieces of aluminum foil and a paper towel, quickly sandwiched them together, and exclaimed in lecture, “Look! It's easy to make a capacitor!” Then we move on from there, calculating things such as capacitances with various dielectrics or plate sizes, the capacitance of capacitor networks, RC circuits, etc. We typically do these calculations with capacitance values that are far removed from what we just created in our quick demonstration of a capacitor. Students might justifiably question whether the capacitor that we blithely made has any relation to the values that we are using in our calculations. It may be useful to investigate the quality of such handmade capacitors so that our students get a more intuitive feel for these ubiquitous electrical components.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.