Film Capacitor Vs Ceramic Capacitor

There are a few types of plastic film capacitors including mylar polycarbonate polyester and polystyrene.

Film capacitor vs ceramic capacitor. Ceramic disc capacitors have a low loss factor a reasonable level of stability and work well with high frequencies. They are generally less expensive than other capacitors and carry lower capacitances couple of µf max which makes them used often during low capacitance requirements in noise harmonics filtering and suppression applications. The typical temperature range for ceramic capacitors is 40 to 85 c or 125 c where their capacitance varies about from 5 to 40 having a sweet spot around 5 to 25 c. Box caps poly film tend to be 5.

Cheap ceramic caps tend to be 20. Made of ceramic material as the dielectric and metal as the electrodes ceramic capacitors come in a variety of shapes and sizes. In particular even in fields where film capacitors have traditionally been used resonance circuits for example replacement with mlcc is now possible. The same dielectric materials are used in the construction of these different types of film capacitors.

We will describe each briefly below. However in recent years there have been remarkable increases in withstand voltage and capacitance in mlccs multilayer ceramic chip capacitors for temperature compensation class 1. You can get some types of film caps in pf values like the panasonic ecq v series but they are more expensive. Film capacitors can be broadly categorised into plastic film capacitors metallized plastic film capacitors and composite film capacitors.

Ceramic caps come in small packages for very small pf values box caps don t usually go below 1nf. I believe that the rate of advancement of class 1 mlcc has been faster than that of film capacitors. Ceramic capacitors are brittle and sensitive to thermal shock so precautions need to be taken to avoid cracking during mounting especially for high capacitance large sizes. Ceramic versus film capacitors as we have discussed mlccs both class 1 and class 2 have advanced greatly with time.

The three main types of capacitors with fixed capacitance are film ceramic and electrolytic. This type of capacitor is very inexpensive to build and most look very much like figure 1.