LAUSR

Undergraduate textbooks of Electronics Engineering courses commonly present the half‐wave rectifier using a simplistic approach based on the linearization of an exponential equation to calculate the voltages in the circuit. However, these equations only apply when the time constant of the circuit is much larger than the period of the input signal and those equations for the case in which this condition is not met, are not presented. Herein, the most common equations in the literature are resumed. Next, the circuit is analyzed using three models of the diode and, for each one, a set of equations has been obtained to calculate the voltages, currents and times of the circuit. To apply these equations, the discharging time of the capacitor must be calculated through the solution of a transcendental equation. Nowadays, the computational tools to make this task easily are common and this should not be a challenge anymore. Also, performing these analyses could improve the understanding of the students and their capability to analyze circuits with diodes. Two examples are proposed to compare the equations proposed with the numerical solutions and the equations found in literature. Errors between the results obtained with the equations and the numerical simulations are less than 1% for the ripple, average and RMS voltages and maximum and repetitive average currents when the constant‐drop model is used. The RMS current had an error of 6% because the conduction time of the diode is larger than that expected because of the nonlinear behavior of the diode.