RC Snubber Resonant Design An RC snubber is just a resistor and capacitor in series that damps out the oscillations occurring when a switched inductive circuit turns off. How this is supposed to work is that the snubber capacitance forms a resonant tank circuit with the inductance, the resistor absorbs the tank’s energy, and the oscillations damp out quickly. In practice, snubber circuits tend to be ill-designed, simply because it seems there’s no good way to measure the actual inductance and stray capacitance at the switch. Folks tend to apply a 100-ohm resistor and a 100 nF capacitor and hope for the best. Sometimes that works. Most of the time it’s suboptimal.