- 2023
- Dec
- 23
An odd little part - single plate selenium rectifier.
Here’s a weird little part I picked up at a show, it was in a “Take as many as you want” box. It’s a single plate selenium rectifier. These components were widely used in the time between tube rectification and silicon rectification, but fell out of service because silicon diodes are simply much more efficient at rectifying AC voltages and providing other diode services.
It’s marked as Federal 179545. It has a forward DC resistance of about 88k, and a reverse resistance of 792k. So what would this have been used for? Bias voltages maybe? Or a diode that would blow if the current went higher than anticipated? I’m not sure.
It’s just a cool piece of yesterday’s technology at this point.