What is exactly happening when AC power is being converted to DC energy?
In: Technology
AC is electricity that goes from positive voltage to negative voltage over and over again. Each time it does this, we call that a cycle. The number of cycles per second are called hertz.
DC is electricity that is always a positive voltage.
There are 2 components you need to know about to converting AC to DC. The first is called a diode. A diode only allows electricity to flow one direction through it. Since AC voltage goes positive to negative, the current flows backward and forward. We want to stop that. The second component is a capacitor. More on that later.
So, imagine a sine wave of electricity, that is AC. The diode chops off the bottom half of the wave, or the negative part. What you have now is like hills of positive voltage with 0 volts between them. This is called pulsing DC. We want to make the pulses smooth, so that the voltage is constant.
This is where the capacitor comes in. The capacitor charges and then slowly releases that charge. So it charges up from the pulse of DC and the releases a longer slowly decreasing voltage that bridges the gap between the hills. Its still not perfectly constant, but its much closer to a constant voltage and most DC items don’t really care about the noise.
Extra credit: there are circuits you can build called full-bridge rectifiers that flip the negative part of the wave to positive and add it to the positive wave so that there is no time when the voltage is at zero and the hills are closer together. This is both more efficient and has less noise. These are made with 4 diodes in a clever arrangement.
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