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A resistor–capacitor circuit (RC circuit), or RC filter or RC network, is an electric circuit composed of resistors and capacitors. It may be driven by a voltage or current source and these will produce different responses. A first order RC circuit is composed of one resistor and one capacitor and is the simplest type of RC circuit.
The RC time constant, denoted τ (lowercase tau), the time constant (in seconds) of a resistor–capacitor circuit (RC circuit), is equal to the product of the circuit resistance (in ohms) and the circuit capacitance (in farads):
Figure 1: Schematic of an electrical circuit illustrating current division. Notation R T refers to the total resistance of the circuit to the right of resistor R X.. In electronics, a current divider is a simple linear circuit that produces an output current (I X) that is a fraction of its input current (I T).
The product τ (tau) = RC is called the time constant of the circuit. The ratio then depends on frequency, in this case decreasing as frequency increases. This circuit is, in fact, a basic (first-order) low-pass filter. The ratio contains an imaginary number, and actually contains both the amplitude and phase shift information of the filter.
Figure 1: Simple RC circuit and auxiliary circuits to find time constants. Figure 1 shows a simple RC low-pass filter. Its transfer function is found using Kirchhoff's current law as follows. At the output, = , where V 1 is the voltage at the top of capacitor C 1. At the center node:
Similarly, in an RC circuit composed of a single resistor and capacitor, the time constant (in seconds) is: = where R is the resistance (in ohms ) and C is the capacitance (in farads ). Electrical circuits are often more complex than these examples, and may exhibit multiple time constants (See Step response and Pole splitting for some examples.)
Series circuit equations RC circuits: Circuit equation + = Capacitor charge = (/) Capacitor discharge = / RL circuits: Circuit equation + = Inductor current ...
Simulation-based methods for time-based network analysis solve a circuit that is posed as an initial value problem (IVP). That is, the values of the components with memories (for example, the voltages on capacitors and currents through inductors) are given at an initial point of time t 0 , and the analysis is done for the time t 0 ≤ t ≤ t f ...