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Activity No. 5 Date Performed: ______________

Rating:_____________ Date Submitted: _______________

_Parallel R - RC Circuit_
Title

I. Objectives

1.1 To determine the current through each branch and the voltage
absorbed by each load.
1.2 To determine the power absorbed by the RC branch.

II. Circuit Diagram

III. Theory

The parallel RC circuit shown in figure 1 behaves very differently when

AC is applied to it, than when DC is applied. With a DC voltage, the capacitor will
charge rapidly to that voltage, after which the only current flowing will be
through the resistor. But with an applied AC voltage, the capacitor cannot ever
reach a final charge, and therefore will always be carrying some current.
To make matters more interesting, we know that the voltage in a parallel
circuit must be the same throughout the circuit. However, the current through R
is not the same as the current through C. Thus, I R is in phase with V, but IC leads V
by 90°.
For this circuit, we will assign experimental values as follows: R = Ω, C =
and VAC = Vrm, frequency ; 60 Hz

This can be easily verified by measuring the current through the branches
of the circuit and voltages across the resistive load and capacitive load.

IV. Procedure
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1. Assemble a theoretical circuit with parameters as shown in section 2.

2. Assign values for Vs as 220V, 60Hz and set R1 and R2 to a constant
value while vary the value of C from 100µF, 200µF and 300µF through
the three trials.
3. For each trial, compute the value of:
a. the voltage across R-branch.
b. the voltage across RC-branch.
c. the voltage across the resistive loads.
d. the voltage across the capacitive load.
e. the current on each branch.

I. V. Data and Results

Given
Trial Voltage Frequency Resistance Capacitance
Source
1 R1 = R2 =
2 R1 = R2 =
3 R1 = R2 =

Trial Computed Values

Current (I) Voltage (V)
IT I1 I2 VR1 VR2 Vc
1
2
3

VI. Computation
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VII. Observation/Conclusion/Generalization