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I had been wondering why do we need AC to charge our phones and not DC?

Can someone please give me a detailed answer for this?

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    Can you elaborate on the premise of your question? "I know we need AC to charge but why do?" This statement is just wrong. – Vladimir Cravero Feb 04 '23 at 13:13
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    You don't need AC to charge your phone as it is charged with DC. It is unclear what you really want to know or ask. – Justme Feb 04 '23 at 13:35

2 Answers2

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The phones use DC to charge. Your phone charger converts the AC mains to a suitable DC voltage to charge your phone i.e. typically 5V. The main reason why phone chargers work on AC input is because it is widely available and you can have access to a wall outlet almost everywhere.

There are chargers that take DC input to charge your phone. They typically step down a higher DC voltage to 5V. One example is a car charger that plugs into a cigarette lighter port.

PCBCrew Engineer
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We actually use DC to charge our phones but, if we want to do this wirelessly, DC won't work so, we use AC for the wireless link and then convert to DC for charging. Also true for transformers; there is no coupled galvanic connection (for reasons of safety) hence we need to use AC to get energy from one side of the transformer to the other.

Andy aka
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