Electrical Wave forms

When studying electrical signals and or power you will notice that a lot of the time electricity is transferred in wave forms. This is for a variety of reasons and with each wave form having its own purpose and applications.

The most common type of waveform you will see is a sinusoidal wave:

I say this is one of the most common as this is how most power is transferred. This is what is call an AC wave. The purpose of this wave is so we can use transformers for lower the current and increase the voltage. This is because of ohms law we do this as less current means there will be less power consumed in the transportation of the power in the transmission lines. This wave is quite simple as it is just basic trig.

The second wave we will look at will be square waves:

This wave comes from data transfer in digital systems as a lot of logic uses ‘High’ and ‘Low’ values where high is when there is voltage and low being zero volts. This is also used for a basic switching converter to step down the voltage in DC applications but most of the time you want a smooth current so you will opt to use a buck converter.

Triangle waves are also another important type of wave form as they have very unique applications to what we have seen this far. triangle wave:

These wave are used more for tuning purposes as they are easy to work with and change. One main application being in musical interments like an electric piano’s.

The lase wave we will talk about will be saw tooth waves and like all of other waves it looks just like it sounds. saw tooth wave:

Saw tooth waves are very similar to triangle waves as they have a lot of the same applications. They are also used in several power applications as well.

This is just a brief summary of the most common waves. Let us know how we can help you @wac.