Electronics are becoming ever more prevalent in my uni course (I’m doing sound engineering). Knowing how your own equipment works and stuff is integral but what is a capacitor. I failed physics in school almost. What does it do. Help.
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Correction to all the answers here: Capacitors do NOT store charge. They store an imbalance of charge, stated as “they store energy”. Any EE or Physicist would blanch at calling it a storage of charge.
As far as ELI5? If you think of electricity as a flow of water, where the pressure is voltage and the total volume of water flowing is the current, then a capacitor is like a bucket that saves up some of that water at various points. This is useful for when the circuit suddenly requires more “water”, it can get it from the bucket and not from the source which is a longer distance away.
Extending this analogy, you can think of inductors as flywheels. When current flows through the inductor , it at first slows the current down, but once the flywheel gets going, it’s as if it doesn’t exist anymore because it’s turning at the same rate as the water flow. If the water stops flowing, the flywheel continues to kick water in the direction of the current, keeping the current going for a bit.
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