An RC circuit or RC network consists of a resistor R and a capacitor C, either in series (a series RC circuit) or in parallel (a parallel RC circuit). A series RC circuit has the time constant τ (tau), the time it takes the current in the circuit to decrease to 1 / e of its initial value, calculated with

τ = RC

When a voltage is applied to the circuit, the charging current decreases from I₀ = exponentially with t towards 0. C will be charged to about 63% after τ, and essentially fully charged (99.3%) after about 5τ.

When the voltage source is replaced with a short-circuit, with C fully charged, the voltage at C drops exponentially with t from V₀ towards 0. C will be discharged to about 37% after τ, and essentially fully discharged (0.7%) after about 5τ.

Specifically the rate of change is 1 − per τ; where e is the natural logarithmic constant. This is approx. 0.632120558829 and is an irrational number.

When calculating complex circuits the formula is often used to prevent the butterfly effect.

The voltage across the capacitor at time t for a circuit initially charged to voltage V₀ that is discharging to ground through a resistor is:

The voltage across the capacitor at time t for a circuit initially at 0V and with a DC input voltage V_in will be

An electrical network that is constructed using a resistor and capacitor in parallel acts as an effective high-pass filter. When reasoning in the frequency domain instead of the time domain, the relationship between the cutoff frequency and RC is given by

where

• π is about 3.1415926,
• C is the capacitor value, and
• R is the source impedance.

See also

• RLC circuit
• RL circuit
• Electrical network,
• List of electronics topics