this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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If I were to take a standard AC to DC converter, say a laptop charger, and hook up the input side (which expects 120VAC at 60Hz) to a DC power supply of some sorts, will the electricity still be "converted," or will it just not work at all? I am clearly very uneducated when it comes to electronics (albeit working on it) so I would very much an ELI5 answer Thanks!

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[–] dewritoninja@pawb.social 7 points 1 year ago (11 children)

The way you get dc from ac is by using a full bridge rectifier that changes the negative peaks of ac into positive ones. If you where to put dc through it it should just pass like normal

[–] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (9 children)

can someone explain this imagine?

[–] directive0@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Please excuse this attempt from a mere technician.

The waveform on the far left is the electrical signal fed into the rectifier. It illustrates a current that starts at zero, then reaches its full positive amplitude, then comes back to zero, then reaches the full negative, then back to zero. This represents an AC or alternating current. This is the way electricity comes out of your wall, usually.

DC or direct current is instead just a constant horizontal line. Ideally no change in the current. This is what we get from batteries and is used in most of our smaller devices like computers and smartphones. So naturally its handy to have a device that "adapts" the AC to DC. A common part of AC to DC Adapters is a rectifier.

The diagram in the center of the image is the schematic of a full bridge rectifier. It shows the two wires that feed into the rectifier on the left, these are then split into an arrangement of diodes represented by triangles with lines at their tips. Diodes essentially only allow current in one direction. The line is representative of a "direction" of the flow. The particular way these diodes are arranged means that no matter what kind of signal is fed in it will never produce a negative voltage at the output.

By using this arrangement we can feed in the AC signal and sort of flip the negative of part of that signal so the waveform looks like the one on the right. You can see that the waveform now is only above the line representing zero.

This is however only one step in the process of a power regulation and so as others have pointed out its not as simple as it may seem. Usually a transformer is used to step up or down voltages, and those are not designed to be used with DC and I believe could be damaged?

[–] kraken@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Good explanation.

As @directive0 said, the diodes (triangles in the above circuit) only conduct in one direction.

On the AC wave (top left) in the positive half, two diodes are conducting. In the negative half, the other two diodes are conducting.

The two sets of diodes are connected so that the positive half and the negative half of the sine wave come out on the same line. Since the waveform on the right of the image is all positive (ignore the bumps), it is considered DC.

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