Voltage Doubler


Objective

To design and study a Voltage Doubler.



Introduction

A voltage doubler is an electronic circuit which charges capacitors from the input voltage and switches these charges in such a way that, in the ideal case, exactly twice the voltage is produced at the output as at its input.

The simplest of these circuits are a form of rectifier which take an AC voltage as input and output a doubled DC voltage. The switching elements are simple diodes and they are driven to switch state merely by the alternating voltage of the input. DC to DC voltage doubler cannot switch in this way and require a driving circuit to control the switching. They frequently also require a switching element that can be controlled directly, such as a transistor, rather than relying on the voltage across the switch as in the simple AC to DC case.

Voltage doubler is a variety of voltage multiplier circuit. Many (but not all) voltage doubler circuits can be viewed as a single stage of a higher order multiplier: cascading identical stages together achieves a greater voltage multiplication.

A voltage multiplier is a specialized rectifier circuit producing an output which is theoretically an integer times the AC peak input, for example, 2, 3, or 4 times the AC peak input. Thus, it is possible to get 200 VDC from a 100 Vpeak AC source using doubler, 400 VDC from a quadrupler. Any load in a practical circuit will lower these voltages.

A voltage doubler application is a DC power supply capable of using either a 240 VAC or 120 VAC source. The supply uses a switch selected full-wave bridge to produce about 300 VDC from a 240 VAC source. The 120 V position of the switch rewires the bridge as a doubler producing about 300 VDC from the 120 VAC. In both cases, 300 VDC is produced. This is the input to a switching regulator producing lower voltages for powering, say, a personal computer.