What is single-phase half-wave rectifier

This post tells about the single-phase half-wave rectifier, it waveforms and characteristics. A single-phase half-wave rectifier circuit is depicted below. This rectifier has a resistive load. This rectifier is the simplest form of diode single-phase rectifiers.

Figure 1. Single-phase half-wave rectifier circuit.

During the positive part the sinus signal diode conducts, during the negative part the sinus signal diode stops conducting. Let’s assume that the voltage transformer is $v_{T} = v_{m a x} \sin (ω t)$ , and the resistor voltage and resistance are $v_{R}$ and $R$ , diode voltage is $v_{d}$ . Then the wave forms for the diode are the following:

Figure 2. Voltage and current for the diode of the single-phase half-wave rectifier.

The resulting voltage and current of single-phase half-wave rectifier is $v_{D C} = \frac{1}{T} \int_{0}^{T} v_{m a x} \sin ω t d t = 0.318 v_{m a x}$ , $\frac{v_{D C}}{R} = I_{D C}$ .

RMS is

r m s v = \sqrt{\frac{1}{T} \int_{0}^{T} (v_{m a x} \sin ω t)^{2} d t} = 0.5 v_{m a x}

r m s i = \frac{v_{m a x}}{2 R}

Rectification ratio (maximum conversion ration) is

η = \frac{P_{D C}}{P_{R}} = \frac{v_{D C} i_{D c}}{v_{R} i_{R}} = 40.5 %

.Form-factor

F F = \frac{v_{D C}}{v_{L}} = 1.57

Ripple factor

R F = \frac{v_{A C}}{v_{D C}} = \sqrt{F F^{2} - 1} = 1.21

Transformer utilisation factor

T U F = \frac{2 v_{D C} v_{A C}}{v_{m a x} i_{m a x}} = 0.286

Digi-Key Electronics offers a great selection of single-phase half-wave rectifiers.