Tishk International University

Engineering Faculty
Computer Engineering Department
Lecture 3

Electronics:
R.M.S and AVG
Filter Circuits

Instructor: Dr. Rand Basil Alhashimie

Outline
• Root Mean Square (r.m.s)
• Average (avg.)
Rectifier with Filters

• Operation of Capacitor filter

• Ripple voltage
• Ripple factor
• Ripple factor for Rectifier circuits without Filters
• Ripple factor for Rectifier circuits with Filters
• Examples
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Root Mean Square (r.m.s)
• Root mean square: is the effective value of the voltage and the current. The effect
of RMS is similar to the dc effect.

• AC voltmeters and ammeters show the RMS value of the voltage or current. DC
meters also show the RMS value when connected to varying DC provided that the
DC is varying quickly.

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How to find r.m.s value:

4
RMS value for
Sinusoidal wave

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RMS Current at the Half-Wave Rectifier
At rectifier circuits, the rms current for the input is equal to the rms current at the output. In order to find it, first
of all it requires to find the output rms voltage at the load (assuming the load is pure resistance) then find the
rms current as shown in the derivation below:
For the input signal which is sinusoidal waveform, the Vrms and Vp has a same shape with different values.
For the output signal, when the half signal is sinusoidal and the other half is zero, the Vorms and Vop, and the Iorms
has the same shape with different values.

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RMS Voltage at the Half-Wave Rectifier

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RMS Current at the Half Wave Rectifier

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RMS Values at the Full-Wave Rectifier
At rectifier circuits, the rms current for the input is equal to the rms current at the output. In order to
find it, first of all it requires to find the output rms voltage at the load (assuming the load is pure
resistance) then find the rms current as shown in the derivation below:
For the input signal which is sinusoidal waveform, the Vrms and Vp has a same shape with different
values.
For the output signal, both halves are sinusoidal, the Vorms and Vop, and the Iorms has the same shape
that shown in the figure below, with different values as will discussed on the next page.

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RMS Current at the Full Wave Rectifier

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How to find the d.c. value for half-wave rectifier?

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How to find the d.c. value for full-wave rectifier?

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Power Supply Filters
• A power supply filter ideally eliminates the fluctuations in the output voltage of a half-
wave or full-wave rectifier and produces a constant-level dc voltage.

• Filtering is necessary because electronic circuits require a constant source of dc voltage

and current to provide power and biasing for proper operation.

• Filters are implemented with capacitors, as you will see in this Lecture. Voltage
regulation in power supplies is usually done with integrated circuit voltage regulators.

• A voltage regulator prevents changes in the filtered dc voltage due to variations in input
voltage or load.
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Power Supply Filters
In most power supply applications, the standard 50 Hz ac power line voltage must be
converted to an approximately constant dc voltage.

The 50 Hz pulsating dc output of a half-wave rectifier or the 100 Hz pulsating output of a

full-wave rectifier must be filtered to reduce the large voltage variations. Figure 1
illustrates the filtering concept showing a nearly smooth dc output voltage from the filter.
The small amount of fluctuation in the filter output voltage is called ripple.

Figure 1: Rectifier with Filter 21

Capacitor Filter
A half-wave rectifier with a capacitor-input filter is shown in Figure 2. The filter is simply
a capacitor connected from the rectifier output to ground. RL represents the equivalent
resistance of a load. We will use the half-wave rectifier to illustrate the basic principle and
then expand the concept to full-wave rectification.

Figure 2 (a): Initial charging of the capacitor (diode is forward-biased)

happens only once when power is turned on. 22
Capacitor Filter
During the positive first quarter-cycle of the input, the diode is forward-biased, allowing
the capacitor to charge to peak voltage of the sinusoid, as illustrated in Figure 2(a).
When the input begins to decrease below its peak, as shown in Figure 2(b), the capacitor
retains its charge and the diode becomes reverse-biased because the cathode is more
positive than the anode.

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Capacitor Filter
During the remaining part of the cycle, the capacitor can discharge only through the load resistance at a rate
determined by the RLC time constant, which is normally long compared to the period of the input. The larger
the time constant, the less the capacitor will discharge.

Figure 2 (b)

The capacitor discharges through RL as shown in Figure 2(b) after peak of positive alternation when the
diode is reverse-biased. This discharging occurs during the portion of the input voltage indicated by the
solid dark blue curve.
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Capacitor Filter
During the first quarter of the next cycle, as illustrated in Figure 2 (c), the diode will again
become forward-biased when the input voltage exceeds the capacitor voltage by
approximately 0.7 V.

Figure 2 (c): The capacitor charges back to peak of input when the diode
becomes forward-biased. This charging occurs during the portion of the
input voltage indicated by the solid dark blue curve.
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Ripple Voltage
As you have seen, the capacitor quickly charges
at the beginning of a cycle and slowly
discharges through RL after the positive peak of
the input voltage (when the diode is reverse-
biased). The variation in the capacitor voltage
due to the charging and discharging is called the
Figure 3
ripple voltage. Generally, ripple is undesirable; Top: Larger ripple (blue) means less effective
thus, the smaller the ripple, the better the filtering.
Bottom: Smaller ripple means more effective
filtering action, as illustrated in Figure 3. filtering. 27
Ripple Voltage
For a given input frequency, the output frequency of a
full-wave rectifier is twice that of a half-wave rectifier,
as illustrated in Figure 4.

This makes a full-wave rectifier easier to filter because

of the shorter time between peaks. When filtered, the
full-wave rectified voltage has a smaller ripple than
does a half-wave voltage for the same load resistance
and capacitor values.

The capacitor discharges less during the shorter Figure 4

interval between full-wave pulses, as shown in Figure
4.
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Next Lecture

• LC Filter

• CLC Filter

• Ripple Factors for C, LC and CLC Filters.

• Exercises