The half wave rectifier is a type of rectifier that converts one half of each cycle of an AC signal into a DC signal (pulsating DC). A half-wave rectifier does not utilize the full cycle of the input AC signal, whereas a full wave rectifier utilizes both half-cycles of the input AC signal. The purpose of this article is to inform the reader about the advantages and disadvantages of half wave rectifiers.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Half Wave Rectifier
Advantages of Half Wave Rectifier
The following are some of the advantages of a half wave rectifier:
1. It is quite easy to construct a half wave rectifier circuit due to its simple design.
2. A very small number of components are required to construct it.
3. In addition, it is not very expensive.
Disadvantages of half wave rectifier
It should be noted that a half wave rectifier has some disadvantages that need to be considered:
1. It has a high ripple factor. It should never be used as the power supply of an audio circuit since a high ripple factor will result in noises in the audio signal, which will subsequently affect the quality of the audio signal.
2. It has low rectification efficiency.
3. It has a low transformer utilization factor.
4. Power is only provided by the AC supply during the half cycle. Therefore, the power output is low.
5. It should be noted that the pulsating current in the output contains AC components with the same frequency as the supply voltage. This results in an increase in the cost of filtering circuits.
Summary
It is rare to find a half wave rectifier in actual practice. It has more disadvantages than advantages, so as a whole, it is not suitable for all applications. To overcome its drawbacks, full wave rectifiers are used instead of half wave rectifiers.
