Helping students understand real capacitors: measuring efficiencies in a school laboratory

A recent reform in the Portuguese secondary school curriculum reintroduced the study of capacitors. Thus we decided to implement some experimental activities on this subject with our undergraduate students in physics education courses. A recent announcement of a new kind of capacitor being developed by a team of scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which makes use of nanotechnologies, was a great motivation for the study of a topic that could easily be considered ‘out of time’. Since this new kind of capacitor is being seen as the battery of the future, our focus was essentially on efficiency measurements, motivating students to obtain, respectively, the time constant and the energies stored and supplied during the charge and discharge processes, from experimental graphics representing the power as a function of time in real capacitors.