The Full-Wave Single-Sided Power Supply

We observed that in the half-wave rectifier, we lost half of our signal. To take advantage of the entire signal we construct a power supply with the full-wave rectifier which is shown in Fig. 1.5.

  

Figure 1.5: Full-Wave Supply with Step-Down Transformer

To transform this signal into an almost constant DC value, we filter it using the same procedure as for the half wave rectifier and power supply. Only this time the ripple voltage should be approximately half of what it was before, since the capacitor will discharge for half the time as it did for the half-wave case. Thus, the AC ripple will be given by

$$\Delta V = \frac{V_{avg}}{2R_LfC} = AC~ripple$$ (8)