A Wire at First, a Gap in the End

You'll learnto draw an uncharged capacitor as a wire and a fully charged one as a gap, to read the voltage it settles at off its own two terminals, and to treat one time constant as a fraction of the way rather than the end.

The instant a circuit closes on an uncharged capacitor, its branch conducts as freely as plain wire; a long time later the same branch carries nothing at all. Both limits are things you can draw. Twelve short steps; press Next for each one.

12 STEPS · 6 QUICK CHECKS · WIRE THEN GAP · ITS OWN TERMINALS · FIVE TAUS · v2

uncharged is a wire · fully charged is a gap · one tau is not the end

Before you start

What you're looking at

A circuit with a capacitor on one branch, drawn as two plates. At each limit the file redraws the capacitor as what it behaves like there.

The question

What flows the instant the circuit closes, and what voltage does the capacitor end up holding?

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