Simple Capacitor Charging Question

capacitorresistorstime constantvoltage divider

Right, I have a very simple circuit that I aim to use as a delay circuit, everything was going fine until I started to over think it all and now I have totally confused myself and it is slightly embarrassing.

This is my circuit:

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

As you can see, nice and simple. I know the time constant of the capacitor is RC to reach 63% of the voltage, but my issue is what is the voltage that it is reaching 63% of? I initially thought the 2V supply (capped at 1V though) that I am using at R2, but then it would charge to 1V in less than RC (not what I want).

I take the time constant as \$1M\Omega \times 1 \mu F = 1\$s but would that be the time to charge to 63% of 2V (but cap out at 1V) or 63% 1V (i.e. take 5 times longer to get to 1V)?

Best Answer

Well... Let's calculate it using Laplace transform.

$$ T(s)=\frac{\frac{\frac{1}{sC}\cdot R_{2}}{\frac{1}{sC}+ R_{2}}}{\frac{\frac{1}{sC}\cdot R_{2}}{\frac{1}{sC}+ R_{2}}+R_{1}}=\frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}+sC\cdot R_{1}R_{2}}=\frac{R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}\cdot \frac{1}{1+sC\cdot \frac{R_{1}R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}} $$ You can see, that we have a resistor divider and RC filter with time constant equal:

$$ \tau = C\cdot \frac{R_{1}R_{2}}{R_{1}+R_{2}}=0.5s $$

So in 0.5s time, you will have a 0.63% of input voltage multiplied by resistor divider - 2V * 0.5 * 63% = 0.63V