When capacitors are connected together in parallel the total or equivalent capacitance, CT in the circuit is equal to the sum of all the individual capacitors added together. This is because the top plate of capacitor, C1 is connected to the top plate of C2 which is connected to the top plate of C3 and so on.
Connecting one end of your capacitor bank to ground (through a resistor or not) isn't going to discharge the caps. You need to connect the resistor across the caps for that to happen. To elaborate on @brhans comment, with the earth switch the circuit is fully isolated and floating with respect to ground.
where A is the area of the plate . Notice that charges on plate a cannot exert a force on itself, as required by Newton’s third law. Thus, only the electric field due to plate b is considered. At equilibrium the two forces cancel and we have The charges on the plates of a parallel-plate capacitor are of opposite sign, and they attract each other.
Capacitors between power and ground is used to suppress spikes. These spikes can damage the board, or at least, the sensitive components. The larger the value of the capacitor, the better the protection. Hope this helps. What is your application/circuit? If it's on a long power line, it could be to just make sure that all AC signals are bypassed.
This is why in decoupling applications we often see larger value capacitors paralleled with smaller values. The smaller value capacitor will typically have lower ESL and continue to behave like a capacitor at higher frequencies. The parallel combination of capacitors covers a wider frequency range than either one of the combinations. Figure 2.
Compute the electric potential difference ∆V. Calculate the capacitance C using C = Q / | ∆ V | . In the Table below, we illustrate how the above steps are used to calculate the capacitance of a parallel-plate capacitor, cylindrical capacitor and a spherical capacitor. Now we have three capacitors connected in parallel.