Testing of the charging and discharging characteristic of chitosan thick film as a capacitor dielectric

Abstract

In this study, chitosan films were fabricated through solution casting method with a thickness of 200 μm. Testing of charging and discharging characteristics of dielectric chitosan film was done by placing a chitosan film in a capacitor system configuration. The testing used an RC series circuit with the supply voltage in DC. Testing of charging and discharging characteristics was conducted in two experimental stages, the first is by varying the supply voltage values of 1V, 3V, 5V, 10V and 15V and the second is by varying the resistance value of 100 Ω, 1K Ω, 10K Ω, 100K Ω and 1M Ω. Variation of the supply voltage was conducted to obtain the charging and discharging characteristic of chitosan film while the variation of the resistance value was conducted to find out the performance of chitosan film. Of the above experiments were obtained that the chitosan film has a very fast response to the electric field. Besides, it was obtained that the performance of chitosan film meets the general equation of capacitance in RC series circuit. Analysis of thermal properties using DSC showed that chitosan film has a low specific heat of 0.016 J/g K.