How does a smartphone charger work?

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Our office recently installed new wall plugs with both the Type D plug outlet (South Africa) and a USB point to charge your phone straight from the wall, without the need for the little white charger that you’d otherwise use.

IF we can use electricity straight from the wall into the phone/powerpack/battery through a USB cable, what is the use of a charge and how exactly does it work?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Those new USB-equipped outlets don’t feed the phone directly from the wall. They basically just have a phone charger hidden inside them.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to/a10138/install-an-electrical-outlet-with-built-in-usb-ports-16544006/

As for how a phone charger works: First it needs to “transform” the AC wall voltage to a lower voltage, and then “rectify” it to DC voltage. Modern phone chargers will typically have some “smart” element to them whereby they “negotiate” with the phone to determine exactly how much voltage and current to deliver. For example, a “dumb” phone charger might only be able to give a phone a “slow” charge of `5V × 2A = 10W`, but a smarter charger might be able to negotiate something like `10V × 4.5A = 45W`.

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