Пульсации напряжения в электронных схемах

Residual periodic variation of voltage
Ripple (specifically ripple voltage) in electronics is the residual periodic variation of the DC voltage within a power supply which has been derived from an alternating current (AC) source. This ripple is due to incomplete suppression of the alternating waveform after rectification. Ripple voltage originates as the output of a rectifier or from generation and commutation of DC power. Ripple (specifically ripple current or surge current) may also refer to the pulsed current consumption of non linear devices like capacitor input rectifiers. As well as these time varying phenomena, there is a frequency domain ripple that arises in some classes of filter and other signal processing networks. In this case the periodic variation is a variation in the insertion loss of the network against increasing frequency. The variation may not be strictly linearly periodic. In this meaning also, ripple is usually to be considered an incidental effect, its existence being a compromise between the amount of ripple and other design parameters. Ripple is wasted power, and has many undesirable effects in a DC circuit: it heats components, causes noise and distortion, and may cause digital circuits to operate improperly. Ripple may be reduced by an electronic filter, and eliminated by a voltage regulator.

Reducing ripple is only one of several principal considerations in power supply filter design. The filtering of ripple voltage is analogous to filtering other kinds of signals. However, in AC/DC power conversion as well as DC power generation, high voltages and currents or both may be output as ripple. Therefore, large discrete components like high ripple current rated electrolytic capacitors, large iron core chokes and wire wound power resistors are best suited to reduce ripple to manageable proportions before passing the current to an IC component like a voltage regulator, or on to the load. The kind of filtering required depends on the amplitude of the various harmonics of the ripple and the demands of the load. For example, a moving coil (MC) input circuit of a phono preamplifier may require that ripple be reduced to no more than a few hundred nanovolts (10−9V). In contrast, a battery charger, being a wholly resistive circuit, does not require any ripple filtering. Since the desired output is direct current (essentially 0Hz), ripple filters are usually configured as low pass filters characterized by shunt capacitors and series chokes. Series resistors may replace chokes for reducing the output DC voltage, and shunt resistors may be used for voltage regulation.

Most power supplies are now switched mode designs. The filtering requirements for such power supplies are much easier to meet owing to the high frequency of the ripple waveform. The ripple frequency in switch mode power supplies is not related to the line frequency, but is instead a multiple of the frequency of the chopper circuit, which is usually in the range of 50kHz to 1MHz.

A capacitor input filter (in which the first component is a shunt capacitor) and choke input filter (which has a series choke as the first component) can both reduce ripple, but have opposing effects on voltage and current, and the choice between them depends on the characteristics of the load. Capacitor input filters have poor voltage regulation, so are preferred for use in circuits with stable loads and low currents (because low currents reduce ripple here). Choke input filters are preferred for circuits with variable loads and high currents (since a choke outputs a stable voltage and higher current means less ripple in this case). The number of reactive components in a filter is called its order. Each reactive component reduces signal strength by 6dB/octave above (or below for a high pass filter) the corner frequency of the filter, so that a 2nd order low pass filter for example, reduces signal strength by 12dB/octave above the corner frequency. Resistive components (including resistors and parasitic elements like the DCR of chokes and ESR of capacitors) also reduce signal strength, but their effect is linear, and does not vary with frequency. A common arrangement is to allow the rectifier to work into a large smoothing capacitor which acts as a reservoir. After a peak in output voltage the capacitor supplies the current to the load and continues to do so until the capacitor voltage has fallen to the value of the now rising next half cycle of rectified voltage. At that point the rectifier conducts again and delivers current to the reservoir until peak voltage is again reached.

A more common solution where good ripple rejection is required is to use a reservoir capacitor to reduce the ripple to something manageable and then pass the current through a voltage regulator circuit. The regulator circuit, as well as providing a stable output voltage, will incidentally filter out nearly all of the ripple as long as the minimum level of the ripple waveform does not go below the voltage being regulated to. Switched mode power supplies usually include a voltage regulator as part of the circuit. Voltage regulation is based on a different principle than filtering: it relies on the peak inverse voltage of a diode or series of diodes to set a maximum output voltage; it may also use one or more voltage amplification devices like transistors to boost voltage during sags. Because of the non linear characteristics of these devices, the output of a regulator is free of ripple. A simple voltage regulator may be made with a series resistor to drop voltage followed by a shunt zener diode whose Peak Inverse Voltage (PIV) sets the maximum output voltage; if voltage rises, the diode shunts away current to maintain regulation.

Ripple current is a periodic non sinusoidal waveform derived from an AC power source characterized by high amplitude narrow bandwidth pulses. The pulses coincide with peak or near peak amplitude of an accompanying sinusoidal voltage waveform. Ripple current results in increased dissipation in parasitic resistive portions of circuits like ESR of capacitors, DCR of transformers and inductors, internal resistance of storage batteries. The dissipation is proportional to the current squared times resistance (I2R). The RMS value of ripple current can be many times the RMS of the load current.

Ripple in the context of the frequency domain refers to the periodic variation in insertion loss with frequency of a filter or some other two port network. Not all filters exhibit ripple, some have monotonically increasing insertion loss with frequency such as the Butterworth filter. Common classes of filter which exhibit ripple are the Chebyshev filter, inverse Chebyshev filter and the Elliptical filter. The ripple is not usually strictly linearly periodic as can be seen from the example plot. Other examples of networks exhibiting ripple are impedance matching networks that have been designed using Chebyshev polynomials. The ripple of these networks, unlike regular filters, will never reach 0 dB at minimum loss if designed for optimum transmission across the passband as a whole. The amount of ripple can be traded for other parameters in the filter design. For instance, the rate of roll off from the passband to the stopband can be increased at the expense of increasing the ripple without increasing the order of the filter (that is, the number of components has stayed the same). On the other hand, the ripple can be reduced by increasing the order of the filter while at the same time maintaining the same rate of roll off.