Advantages and disadvantages of bridge rectifier

There are some advantages of bridge rectifier which are given below,

• It can be used in application allowing floating output terminals, i.e. no output terminal is grounded.
• The need for centre-tapped transformer is eliminated.
• The transformer is less costly as it is required to provide only half the voltage of an equivalent centre-tapped transformer used in a full wave rectifier.
• If stepping up or stepping down of AC voltage is not needed, and then it does not even require any transformer.

There are some disadvantages of bridge rectifier which are given below,

• It requires four semiconducting diodes.
• Two diodes in series conduct at a time on alternate half cycles. This creates a problem when low DC voltages are required. This leads to poor voltage regulation.