I've seen some circuits where a decoupling capacitor is used as well as a reservoir capacitor, like this (C4 and C5):



I've read about decoupling capacitors and for me it looks as if they are meant to remove small fluctuations in the supply voltage. Then I thought - wasn't that the purpose of a reservoir capacitor as well? Why wouldn't the reservoir capacitor be able to filter out the small fluctuations, if it is able to filter out the large fluctuations?

So I feel like I have a basic misunderstanding here. What is the purpose of a decoupling capacitor next to a reservoir capacitor, when we assume we place both equally near to the power consuming part? Or is the only advantage of the decoupling capacitor that it is smaller and can therefore be easily placed more near to the power consuming part?

The most likely reason why that is done is because, in real life, capacitors do not have infinite bandwidth. Generally, the higher the capacitance of the capacitor, the less it will be able to react to high frequencies, while small-valued capacitors react better to higher frequencies, as seen in the graph below. Using two different-valued capacitors together is just done to improve the response of the filtering.


