Electrical – Capacitor loop charging

battery-chargingcapacitorvoltage

During my journey to electronics I came across several questions about capacitors.

  1. If we connect an empty capacitor to a fully charged re-chargeable battery, after the battery charged the capacitor, it then became empty (wires still connected and never touched), what will happen in this situation? Will the capacitor re-charge the battery? Or will its charge drop due to the battery’s internal resistance without charging it?

  2. If we replaced the battery with a charged capacitor (empty capacitor and charged capacitor with same values) what will happen in this situation?

  3. If we connect a charged capacitor and an empty capacitor and a charged battery all in parallel, what will happen?

Any help to clear my doubts is preciously appreciated.

Best Answer

Any help to clear my doubts is preciously appreciated

Consider two tanks of water: -

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Tank 1 is your fully charged battery and tank 2 is your capacitor. After a short while the levels will equalize. Tank 1 will have dropped its height a little bit in order to fill up tank 2 to a pretty high level. If you had a really massively big capacitor (tank 2) you might deplete tank 1 quite a lot.

Voltage = water level in each tank and tank cross sectional area (plan view) is equivalent to capacitance.

This pretty much applies to all mentioned scenarios.

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