Text: 4/28/03 Dale; your question of how does a capacitor really work never comes up in a manufacturing plant and I do not think that the people making them know. Certainly there are formulas about the plate area and the K factor of the dielectric affecting the capacitor value. There is Q and dissipation factor, ESR, series inductance, leakage, IR, breakdown voltage, etc. The analogy of how the charge is stored would be to think of a rubber band. As you increase the charge the rubber band is stretched. The dielectric is stressed and wants to return to an unstressed condition. The charge is not stored in the plates, just the dielectric. The atoms become elongated and stretched out of shape or polarized. The difference between an insulator and a conductor is that the insulator's atoms will not give up it's electrons while a conductor will. Tesla made his own high voltage high power capacitors using beer bottles. One of the plates was a metal bathtub filled with salt water. In that tub he placed a large number of beer bottles filled with salt water and a metal rod. All the metal rods coming out of the beer bottles were connected together to form the other plate. He used a particular brand manufactured bottle because it had the highest K factor.

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