# Characteristics of Half Wave Rectifier

### Characteristics of Half Wave Rectifier

A rectifier is a circuit which converts the Alternating Current (AC) input power into a Direct Current (DC) output power. A half-wave rectifier is a circuit that allows only one half-cycle of the AC voltage waveform to be applied to the load, resulting in one non-alternating polarity across it.

Characteristics of Half Wave Rectifier:

1. Ripple factor: It is defined as the amount of AC content in the output DC. It nothing but amount of AC noise in the output DC. Less the ripple factor, performance of the rectifier is more. The ripple factor of half wave rectifier is about 1.21.

2. Efficiency: The efficiency is defined as the ratio of input AC to the output DC. The efficiency of half wave rectifier is about 40.6% this is less when compared to the full wave rectifier (81.2%).

3. Transformer Utilization Factor (TUF): The TUF is defined as the ratio of DC power is delivered to the load and the AC rating of the transformer secondary.

4. Peak Inverse Voltage: It is defined as the maximum voltage that a diode can withstand in reverse bias. The half wave rectifier has Vm and full wave rectifier has 2Vm.

Half wave rectifier has around 0.287 and full wave rectifier has around 0.693. Half wave rectifier is mainly used in the low power circuits. It has very low performance when it is compared with the other rectifiers.

5. Form Factor: Form factor is defined as the ratio of RMS value to the DC value.

$$Form\,\,Factor\,\,=\,\,\frac{RMS\,\,Value}{DC\,\,Value}$$

The form factor of a half wave rectifier is 1.57.