Is it similar to the waves on the surface of an ocean, where the particles go 2 steps forward and 1 step back in waves? If so, what makes it do that? Why would that be used instead of DC current?
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Imagine you are hanging on a rope with a **jumar** – a ratcheting clamp that only slides **up** a rope. Right next to you is another rope that slowly moves up and down, and stops for long enough to grab a handle on the rope. The rope next to you goes down and stops, so you grab the handle. When the moving rope goes up, it pulls you up, and your jumar on the static line sides up as well. When the moving rope stops, you let go the handle and hang on the static line until the moving rope stops, and you can grab on to move up again. In this way, you ascend the static line, but the moving line is basically in the same place. But you are only going up half the time.
But what if the moving line was actually a loop, so there were two moving lines, one side going up and the other side going down, and then swapping. Then you could swap handles from one side to the other, and you would keep moving up the static line, twice as fast as you were going previously.
These examples are half-wave rectification, and full-wave rectification. The electronic equivalent of a jumar is called a diode, and it only allows current to flow in one direction. Using multiple diodes and a crossover, you can perform full-wave rectification on an AC voltage to convert it to pulsating waves that are all positive. Add a big capacitor, and the pulsing wave output is smoothed to a stable DC current.
If you had three looped ropes all running at different times, you could always grab the fastest upward moving rope, and go even faster – this is three-phase AC supply.
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