Understanding Capacitors

The following assumes you have already learnt about capacitors but have not fully understood. I hope to demonstrate by using your imagination. I have cleaned this up for the benefit of younger surfers.

Capacitor Operation
Imagine a large pane of glass separating a large room. The room has a corridor leading into each sectioned off area. The corridors have an interconnecting door that for the moment is closed. Both corridors lead to two large entrances that have very large gates on them at each end of the building. Males and Females are written above these gates respectively. Outside there is a massive queue of females at one gate and males at the other, all wanting to find a suitable partner.

The glass is the insulation material between the plates, the sections of the room are the plates, the corridors are the wires, the interconnecting door is a switch, the gates are switches and the queues are those from a battery. The male and female represent the negative and positive of the battery.

When the outer gates open a flow of people will start as they all try to get to the glass to see who is going to be their date. As the sections fill up this flow reduces until almost no flow occurs. At this point the main gates are shut (The battery as been disconnected). One or two couples manage to meet up by climbing over the glass divide and if left long enough all the couples would meet their partners in this way. However we are going to open the connecting door and in so doing allow all the male and females to start dating. In so doing we create a flow in the opposite direction away from the sections of the room. When all the male and females have dates the flow will drop to zero.