I have found some projects of interest, and on them there are generally a polarized capacitor in the range of 10 multiple (0.1uf, 1f, 10uf, 100uf, etc), and I do not know why I ordered a lot of polarized capacitors in the 47 range (0.47uf, 4.7uf, 47uf, 470uf and 4700uf), but unpolarized ones of the 10 multiples range.
If I place a unpolarized capacitor in place of a polarized one, can it discharge the wrong way, and burn my circuit?
It will not damage your circuit, but there are many other characteristics of capacitors that are important to a circuit working: voltage rating, current rating, equivalent series resistance, dc bias derating, etc.
No, no such thing will happen. But you have to be careful for another reason:
A schematic will specify capacitor types, e.g. aluminium, tantalum, paper, polypropylen, polyester, ceramics of certain types. It will also tell if there are special ratings to follow, e.g. for ESL and ESR, and X and Y safety features.
If there's nothing marked in the schematic, you can assume all unmarked unpolarized caps are either ceramic or polypropylen, and all unmarked polarized caps are aluminium ones. You can drop in polypropylen caps for small aluminium ones usually.
You may not know that there are millions of different capacitors with a dozen different specifications which may or may not matter in any given circuit.
Even in electrolytics and ceramics there a dozen different families which tradeoff different parameters such as;
Cost, Size, Voltage rating, tan delta @120Hz, ESR, ripple current , rated voltage, leakage current, temp. vs accelerated short life rating. e.g. 1000hrs at 105'C, self resonanct frequency, capacitance vs V vs 'C and shape, aspect ratio, value AND tolerance.
It depends on the application demands or specs for impedance(f), current (rms) and Vpk/rated ratio, leakage equiv R, ripple voltage, f attenuation. etc
Will it work? to do what?
For electrolytics; there are General Purpose polar, non-polar, low ESR, ultra low ESR, high temp, ultra high temp, high ripple current.
So for general purpose applications, no problem.
Due to impedance Z(f)=1/(2pi*fC) and Self Resonant frequency (SRF), some designs limit the useful range of e-caps to a few decades in f, and ESR dops with rising uF so SRF also rises with smaller uF ( family sensitive).
Thus it was common in power filters to use 0.01(ceramic)//1uF/100uF 0.047/4.7//100uF//1mF depending on design and surge currents and rate of dI/dt. There is no one solution to all problems.
