Sunday, 15 June 2014

diodes - current through the smoothing capacitor in bridge rectifier



Can any one tell the reason for the current through the smoothing capacitor to be pulsating in the full bridge rectifier.
I have attached the screenshots of the circuit and the wave form obtained in Multisim.This is the circuit what have used an i need to find the capacitor current


These are the wave forms i got for the capacitor voltage and current



Answer




The transformer can only supply current to the load while the transformer voltage is above the capacitor voltage. At all other times the capacitor supplies current to the load.


Since all power ultimately has to come from the transformer and the diodes only conduct part of the time then the current pulses will be many times that of the average load current.


enter image description here


Figure 1. The half-wave rectifier version of the waveforms. The green current waveform has been superimposed on the original graph.


See my answer to Interpreting the ripple curve of a half wave rectifier which discuses the same question for a half-wave rectifier.


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