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The circuits are a display of two centre-tapped full-wave rectifiers, one with a smoothing capacitor between the sources and the load and one without.
In both circuits, the diodes only allow current to pass when in forward bias (or during the positive half of their duty cycle). Current does not flow back through the diode so that when one is negative, the other is positive, allowing current to flow in its own forward bias. This allows us to see the absolute value waveform on the load.
In the upper circuit, the placement of a "smoothing" capacitor initially causes the waveform to take a longer time to reach peak amplitude but after that, for the majority of the period, the voltage we see across the load is not the product of the waveform generators but a result of the capacitor discharging into the load. At the peak of the wave, the capacitor charges what it requires before discharging for most of the next cycle.
In the simplest sense, this is a way to build a simple DC power supply that takes a transformed (not included) AC mains voltage and corrects it into a smooth DC voltage output. Obviously, additional circuitry can make the output more stable and resistant to current and voltage spikes but that is beyond the scope of this example.
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