Then to summarise, the total or equivalent capacitance, CT of a circuit containing Capacitors in Series is the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of all of the individual capacitance’s added together.
This page titled 13.5: Resistance and Capacitance in Series is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jeremy Tatum via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform. The impedance of a resistance and a capacitance shows that the voltage lags behind the current.
With series connected resistors, the sum of all the voltage drops across the series circuit will be equal to the applied voltage VS ( Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law ) and this is also true about capacitors in series. With series connected capacitors, the capacitive reactance of the capacitor acts as an impedance due to the frequency of the supply.
The ESR, or Equivalent Series Resistance is an electrical property that refers to the electrical resistance found in series with a capacitor in a circuit. Essentially, it represents the internal resistance of an actual capacitor, which is an inherent characteristic of all capacitors, even those considered to be of high quality.
In the previous parallel circuit we saw that the total capacitance, CT of the circuit was equal to the sum of all the individual capacitors added together. In a series connected circuit however, the total or equivalent capacitance CT is calculated differently.
Figure 8.3.1 8.3. 1: (a) Three capacitors are connected in series. The magnitude of the charge on each plate is Q. (b) The network of capacitors in (a) is equivalent to one capacitor that has a smaller capacitance than any of the individual capacitances in (a), and the charge on its plates is Q.
Capacitors and inductors as used in electric circuits are not ideal components with only capacitance or inductance. However, they can be treated, to a very good degree of approximation, as being ideal capacitors and inductors in series with a resistance; this resistance is defined as the equivalent series resistance (ESR). If not otherwise specified, the ESR is always an AC resistance, which means it is measured at specified frequencies, 100 kHz for switched-mode power supply compo…
When capacitors are connected in series, the total capacitance is less than any one of the series capacitors'' individual capacitances. If two or more capacitors are connected in series, the overall effect is that of a single (equivalent) capacitor …