never really played with a PUT before (actually never heard of em) but i was interested and read the datasheet.
It looks like the current through the PUT is dependent on the resistance between gate and ground, which explains why when the cap is feeding the LED it doesn't get really mad about the LED not having a current limiting resistor. In this case the Rg gate resistance is your R3. My guess is that when you moved R3 up to 96k your limiting the current so much that your LED isn't getting to full brightness.
Additionally the low limit of this current combined with a really big cap means your capacitor discharges much slower. Combine this with the very small R1, which charges the cap quickly, and i'm betting you are getting some oscillation, but its happening very, very fast.
Try a larger R1, smaller R3 and whatever sized R2 you need to keep the divider ratio the same. Ideally track down a smaller cap, it would make finding the resistor sizes needed easier.
Capacitors don't store charge. That's such a worthless statement because it's based on this word "charge" that has multiple meanings. Please forget you ever heard it. They also do not smooth energy. What they smooth is voltage.
I will answer you question, but first you must really understand how capacitors work.
What capacitors store is energy. The stuff that flows around in electric circuits is electric charge. We measure rate of flow of charge in amperes. Quantity of charge is measured in coulombs. Because charge is never created nor destroyed, whenever we are measuring charge we are usually counting charge that flows past a metaphorical gate. Except for some very odd circuits, the total charge in an electronic device is also constant. It is very much like a closed hydraulic system: there's some fluid in it and you can move it around, but none ever enters or leaks out. You can count how much fluid flows past some point, but it must come from somewhere, and it must go somewhere else.
Imagine if you had a spherical vessel, filled with a fluid. Down the center of the vessel is a rubber plate that you can stretch by pushing fluid in one side and pumping it out the other. That's what a capacitor is like:
This is from Bill Beaty's excellent capacitor misconceptions.
When you push water in one side, an equal amount of water must come out the other side. Further, once this rubber membrane is stretched, it wants to return to being straight. Thus, the water pressure on one side will be higher than the other. If you were to remove the stoppers and replace them with a hose, water would flow until the rubber were not stretched.
Now replace "water" with "electric charge", and "pressure" with "voltage", and you have a capacitor.
Now imagine two vessels, one the size of a golf ball, and one the size of a swimming pool. Each has a membrane of identical stretchiness in the middle. If you pump a tablespoon of water through the golf ball sized vessel, the membrane will be stretched a lot, and consequently the pressure difference between the sides will be great. If you do the same to the swimming pool sized vessel, the membrane will barely move at all, and the pressure difference will just be slightly more than nothing.
This is what capacitance is. It tells you, for a given quantity of water moved, what the pressure difference is. It tells you, for a given amount of electric charge moved through the capacitor, what the voltage will be. It is defined as:
$$ C = {q \over V} $$
Where:
- \$C\$ is capacitance, measured in farads,
- \$q\$ is charged moved through the capacitor, measured in coulombs, and
- \$V\$ is voltage, measure in (you guessed it) volts.
Don't get hung up on "coulomb". A coulomb is how much charge moves past a point if 1 ampere is flowing for 1 second. Or, 2 amperes for half a second. Or, 1/2 ampere for 2 seconds.
If you took calculus, then you will recognize that charge is the integral of current. In other words, charge is to current as distance is to velocity. You can replace "ampere" with "coulomb per second" -- the units are exactly the same.
Using that knowledge and a bit of basic calculus, capacitance can also be defined in terms of voltage and current:
$$ {\mathrm d V(t) \over \mathrm d t} = {I(t) \over C} $$
What this says is: the rate of change of voltage over time (volts per second) is equal to the current (amperes or coulombs per second) divided by the capacitance (farads).
If you have a 1 farad capacitor, and you are moving 1 ampere (1 coulomb per second) through it, then voltage across the capacitor will change at the rate of 1 volt per second.
If you double that capacitance, then the rate of change of voltage will be half.
And here, I think, is the answer to your question. Frequently capacitors are put across the power supply to hold the voltage steady. This works because the more capacitance you have, the harder it is to change the voltage, because it requires more current to do so.
In this application, capacitors don't smooth energy, they smooth voltage. They do so by providing a storage of energy from which the load can draw during times of transient high current. This makes the power supply's job easier because it doesn't have to deal with high changes in current. In effect, the capacitor helps to average the current demand of the load as seen by the power supply.
Best Answer
Trying to start a single phase motor with only one winding would be a bit like trying to start a bike with only one pedal. It's OK once you get it going but trying to get the start direction right and starting from top or bottom dead-centre is awkward.
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
Induction motor with square rotor because there is no circle tool in the schematic editor.
The single phase induction motor is similar. To solve the problem an auxiliary, usually weaker, winding is added to the motor and it is offset from the main coil by, say, 30°. A capacitor is wired in series with this coil and it has the effect of causing a shift in the phase of the current in the auxiliary winding relative to that of the main winding. The result is that the magnetic field in one winding leads the other and this imparts enough rotational force into the rotor to:
Some motors feature a centrifugal switch which disconnects the auxiliary winding once the motor exceeds a certain speed as it is no longer required. This saves a little energy and reduces motor heating.
Understanding capacitor current
We usually learn about capacitors in DC circuits where it is easy to visualise the capacitor charging up and then discharging and the capacitor voltage follows the RC charge / discharge curve. Usually in these scenarios the applied voltage doesn't alternate above and below zero volts. This way of thinking doesn't help us much in AC circuit analysis.
Let's consider the start winding again. For simplicity we're going to ignore the inductance of both windings and think of them as resistors. Using our simple model:
The capacitor current is given by the rule \$I = \frac{dQ}{dt}\$ where Q is the charge. This simply tells us that the current will be greatest when the rate of charge movement is greatest. The capacitor charge is given by \$Q = C \cdot V\$ and combining the two we get \$I = C \frac {dV}{dt}\$. All we're saying here is that the capacitor current is proportional to the rate of change of voltage.
simulate this circuit
Simplification: Again we're ignoring inductance and treating the windings as low value resistors (relative to the impedance of the capacitor).
At 270° the voltage (red) is at maximum negative. The capacitor is charged fully negative and since the voltage has stopped falling (going negative) the current has fallen to zero (blue curve is at zero).
From 270° to 0° the voltage will be increasing. The rate of change will get faster and faster as it approaches zero. For this reason the current will increase from zero reaching maximum current at 0°.
At 0° the capacitor is fully discharged but the rate of change of voltage is highest (steepest on the curve). This will charge up the capacitor and, since the charge rate - the current - is proportional to the rate of change of voltage, the current reaches a maximum here.
For the next 0° to 90° the rate of change of voltage is decreasing and the current decreases to zero.
The same pattern repeats but in the opposite directions in the next 180°.
Notes: