What is exactly happening when AC power is being converted to DC energy?
In: Technology
This is one of those things that’s much harder to explain with just words, so I’m going to invest about a hundred seconds in MSpaint to make some bad images that will help a great deal.
First off, DC, or direct current, is electricity that flows in one direction.
AC, or alternating current is simply electricity that switches directions on a regular basis. Household AC switches 60 times per second.
AC starts out looking like this on a device called an oscilloscope. You can see it smoothly changes from one direction (positive, or +) to the other (negative, or -):
Using a pretty simple circuit, you can ‘cut off’ one side and send it all in one direction, so that it looks like this:
That circuit just uses a few components called diodes, which only allow electricity to flow in one direction through it.
The problem is that it isn’t very smooth. It’s more like very fast bursts of DC current, so we need to try and fill in those gaps.
To do that, we use a component called a capacitor. That device is like a tiny battery. When there is current going through it, it charges up. When there isn’t, it discharges. We can use these to sort of fill in those gaps, like so:
The better a job done by the capacitors, the more it looks like a straight line, the closer to pure DC it gets.
There are more modern ways of converting AC to DC with much more accurate results using transistors, but this classic way has been around for a very long time.
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