Rectifiers

08/08/16

“How can we turn AC electricity into to DC?”

 

After studying how inverters can turn DC electricity in to AC, you might be wondering, “Can the inverse happen?, and if so, how do we accomplish it?”.

Well, let’s think about it. We know that the primary principle of AC electricity is that it switches the direction of current through a circuit at a certain time interval. However, if we add a diode in to this circuit, then the current will only be able to flow in one direction. Through this we would come much closer to our goal of DC electricity, with the current flowing in only one direction. However, a drawback of this solution is that the voltage and therefore current would be zero for half of the time it operates. A quick fix to this problem would be to use four diodes instead of one. With this setup, no matter which direction the current is in, there will be a voltage across the output. To further improve this device, we can add a capacitor, so when the voltage changes the capacitor absorb some of the moving particles, therefore balancing out this change.