What is the most common use for capacitors?
Capacitor
The physical form and construction of practical capacitors vary widely and many capacitor types are in common use. Most capacitors contain at least two electrical conductors often in the form of metallic plates or surfaces separated by a dielectric medium. A conductor may be a foil, thin film, sintered bead of metal, or an electrolyte. The nonconducting dielectric acts to increase the capacitor's charge capacity. Materials commonly used as dielectrics include glass, ceramic, plastic film, paper, mica, and oxide layers. Capacitors are widely used as parts of electrical circuits in many common electrical devices. Unlike a resistor, an ideal capacitor does not dissipate energy.
Film capacitor
The most popular simple snubber circuit consists out of a film capacitor and a resistor in series, connected in parallel with a semiconductor component to suppress or damp undesirable voltage spikes. The capacitor absorbs the inductive turn-off peak current temporarily, so that the resulting voltage spike is limited. But the trend in modern semiconductor technology is towards higher power applications, which increases the peak currents and switching speeds. In this case, the boundary between a standard electronic film capacitor and a power capacitor is blurred, so that larger snubber capacitors belong more in the area of power systems, electrical installations and plants.