Ceramic Disc Capacitor Codes

Unlike resistors capacitors use a wide variety of codes to describe their characteristics.

Ceramic disc capacitor codes.

The first two numbers describe the value of the capacitor and the third number is the number of zeros in the multiplier. An american company in the midst of the apollo program launched in 1961 pioneered the stacking of multiple discs to create a monolithic block. Ceramic capacitor codes how to read a ceramic capacitor with numeric coding. The example capacitor has a 3 digit number printed on it 103.

Ceramic disc capacitors like the one on the left are printed with a code. The capacitor on the left is of a ceramic disc type capacitor that has the code 473j printed onto its body. Ceramic disc capacitors have two to three digits code printed on them. When the first two numbers are multiplied with the multiplier the resulting value is the value of the capacitor in picofarads.

The value of the capacitor is denoted in picofarads for ceramic film and tantalum capacitors but for aluminium electrolytic capacitors the value is denoted in microfarads. The first two digits in this case the 10 give us the first part of the value. If the capacitor code consist only 1 or 2 digits it is simply their capacitance value in picofarads pf. I have always been unaware of the markings on a disc ceramic capacitor such as j m and other symbols.

0r5 is 0 5 1r0 is 1 0 and 2r2 is 2 2 etc. This code indicates what the capacitance of the capacitor is. The third digit is the multiplier which is 1000. 47pf 1 000 3 zero s 47 000 pf 47nf or 0 047uf the j indicates a tolerance of 5.

For small values the letter r is used to denote a decimal point e g. For example if a ceramic capacitor has a code 5 and other has 47 their respective capacitance values are 5 pf and 47 pf. Physically small capacitors are especially difficult to read due to the limited space available for printing. Encoding for ceramic capacitors ceramic capacitors encoding consists 1 3 digits.

The first two significant digits represent the first two digits of the actual value which is 47. Multiplier table ceramic number multiply by additional of zeros 0 none 0 1 10 1. They are very easy to decode to find the value. Ceramic disc capacitor code label will normally consist of three numbers followed by a letter.