Electrical Engineering Fundamentals/Voltage Sources
Appearance
A voltage source provides a potential difference.
There are several types of voltage sources. The most common ones are direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) .
A DC voltage source has constant voltage across its terminals. Examples of DC voltage sources are batteries and solar cells.
An AC voltage source has a voltage across its output the shape of sine wave with constant amplitude:
where
- is the voltage at time
- is the peak voltage
- is the angular frequency
- is the time
- is some phase, which is often set to zero at
An example of an AC voltage source is the AC generator.