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The amount of the electric charge injected by the streamer corona bursts during the stage of leader inception determines the energy deposited to thermalize the corona stem into a leader segment. This paper is aimed at investigating the critical charge required for positive leader inception in air by using a thermo-hydrodynamic model with a detailed kinetic scheme. In order to simplify the analysis and to speed up the simulation, a reduced kinetic scheme for air is proposed. Numerical comparisons show that the reduced scheme can obtain almost the same results as the previous comprehensive kinetic scheme but with only half of the number of species and reactions. The thermo-hydrodynamic model with the reduced kinetics is then used to solve the radial dynamics of a single stem heated by current pulses typical of streamer corona bursts. The critical charge necessary for the direct transition of a first streamer corona into a leader under electrodes with large curvature radius is estimated between 0.08 and 0.5 uC per stem. Furthermore, the simulation shows that the gas heating of corona stem formed from electrodes with small curvature radius is mainly determined by the total accumulated charge injected by previous streamer corona bursts and the length of the dark periods in between the current pulses. The shape and the number of the corona current pulses in the discharge also play a role and their effects are discussed. It is suggested that the transition into a leader is triggered when a secondary streamer burst is initiated after the gas temperature is increased by the heating of previous streamers to about 1200 K. In addition, it is found that the heating produced by the charge injected by previous streamer corona bursts can be neglected if the dark period to the next burst is larger than few hundreds of for a corona stem with moderate initial stem radius. This indicates that the critical charge criterion obtained from laboratory experiments does not hold to evaluate, QC 20171212

This work presents an experimental study ofsecond mode positive streamers propagating along mineral oilpaperinterfaces. A point-plane arrangement immersed inmineral oil with the paper inclined 60 degrees to the planeelectrode is used to create the liquid-solid interface. Kraft paperand a kraft fibril paper, made from cellulosic micro and nanofibrils, with higher density and lower surface roughness are usedas the solid materials. High speed shadowgraphy and chargerecordings are used to compare the propagation of second modepositive streamers along the mineral oil-kraft paper and mineraloil-kraft fibril paper. Streamers creeping along the mineral oilkraftpaper interface propagate mainly into the liquid, with oneor two main filaments. In comparison, the streamers propagatingalong the kraft fibril paper show a strong reduction of thebranching; these streamers consist of a single filament thatpropagates exactly on the solid surface. Streamers along the kraftfibril paper also have longer propagation time than for the casewith kraft paper. Mutual electrostatic shielding betweenfilaments is observed for the streamers creeping on the kraftpaper. An electrostatic analysis of the influence of permittivity,density and surface roughness of the solid in the electricalproperties of the streamer filaments is also performed., QC 20170901

The inception of leader discharges in long air gaps at atmospheric pressure is simulated with a thermo-hydrodynamic model and a detailed kinetic scheme for N2/O2/H2O mixtures. In order to investigate the effect of humidity, the kinetic scheme includes the most important reactions with the H2O molecule and its derivatives, resulting in a scheme with 45 species and 192 chemical reactions. The heating of a thin plasma channel in front of an anode electrode during the streamer to leader transition is evaluated with a detailed 1D radial model. The analysis includes the simulation of the corresponding streamer bursts, dark periods and aborted leaders that may occur prior to the inception of a propagating leader discharge. The simulations are performed using the time-varying discharge current in two laboratory discharge events of positive polarity reported in the literature as input. Excellent agreement between the simulated and the experimental time variation of the thermal radius for a 1m rod-plate air gap discharge event reported in the literature has been found. The role of different energy transfer and loss mechanisms prior to the inception of a stable leader is also discussed. It is found that although a small percentage of water molecules can accelerate the vibrational-translational relaxation to some extent, this effect leads to a negligible temperature increase during the streamer-to-leader transition. It is also found that the gas temperature should significantly exceed 2000 K for the transition to lead to the inception of a propagating leader. Otherwise, the strong convection loss produced by the gas expansion during the transition causes a drop in the translational temperature below 2000 K, aborting the incepted leader. Furthermore, it is shown that the assumptions used by the widely-used model of Gallimberti do not hold when evaluating the streamer-to-leader transition., QC 20170807

In this paper, we extended the recent work of Liu and Becerra to employ the position-state separation (POSS) method to simulate filamentary streamer discharges. POSS is a semi-Lagrangian method, which solves convection-dominated continuity equations without numerical flux correction. An improved interpolation strategy for POSS is here introduced to overcome the excessive numerical diffusion of the method when very small time step is used. Several benchmark tests in the literature are used to validate the improved method. Numerical experiments show that POSS is an accurate, efficient, and robust numerical method to simulate streamer discharges in arbitrary geometries when combined with finite-element method., QC 20170314

A computationally efficient model to evaluate stable glow corona discharges and their transition into streamers is proposed. The simplified physical model referred to as the SPM is based on the classic hydrodynamic model of charge particles and a quasi-steady state approximation for electrons. The solution follows a two-step segregated procedure, which solves sequentially the stationary continuity equation for electrons and then time-dependent continuity equations for ions. The validity of using the SPM to simulate glow corona discharges and their transition into streamers is demonstrated by performing comparisons with a fully coupled physical model (FPM) and with experimental data available in the literature for air under atmospheric conditions. It is shown that the SPM can obtain estimates similar to those calculated with the FPM and those measured in experiments but using significantly less computation time. Since the proposed model simulates efficiently the ionization layer without prior knowledge of the surface electric field or the discharge current, it is a computationally efficient alternative to calculations of glow corona discharges based on Kaptzov's approximation (KAM). The model can also be employed to efficiently calculate the conditions for the transition of glow corona into streamers, overcoming the limitations of KAM to provide such estimates., QC 20170215

Attachment of downward subsequent dart leaders has been recently proposed as a possible mechanism of lightning damage of wind turbine blades. Since subsequent dart and dart-stepped leaders propagating after the first lightning discharge are one-to-two orders of magnitude faster than downward stepped leaders, the direct evaluation of the dart leader interception by upward connecting leaders from the turbine has not been attempted before. In this paper, the self-consistent leader inception and propagation model SLIM is used to evaluate the lightning attachment process of subsequent dart leaders by accounting the rapid changing electric fields produced by their fast descent toward the ground. For this, an improved evaluation of the charge per unit length required to thermalize the upward connecting leader is derived. The analysis considers upward connecting leaders propagating along the preheated channel of a prior discharge. Three study cases of lightning attachment of dart leaders and dart-stepped leader reported in rocket-triggered lightning experiments are evaluated. It is shown that reasonable predictions of the length, duration, and velocity of positive upward connecting leaders can be obtained with SLIM in agreement with the experimental results. Further research on upward leader discharges necessary to improve the modeling of attachment of dart lightning leaders is discussed., QC 20170113

This document presents an experimental study on the propagation of first mode negative streamers along mineral oil-solid interfaces. Samples made of an oil impregnated kraft paper and a low-porosity paper made from cellulosic micro and nano fibrils, as well as different polymeric films (low density polyethylene (LDPE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)) are used as the solid. A comparison of the length, charge and velocity of streamers for all different mineral oil-solid interfaces is reported. It is shown that streamers propagate longer and faster along mineral oil-solid interfaces with low surface roughness, low porosity and higher electrical permittivity than mineral oil. Those streamers show a quasi-continuous injection of charge in the early stage of their propagation. This quasi-continuous charge injection consists of a sequence of small charge steps separated by few tens of nanoseconds in between. In comparison, the streamers that propagate along surfaces with similar permittivity to the mineral oil have lower injection of charge and higher stopping voltage conditions than streamers propagating free in the liquid without any solid barrier., QC 20170901

Polymers exposed to high intensity arc plasmas release material in a process called arc-induced ablation. In order to investigate the degradation fragments released due to this process, two different polymeric materials, poly(oxymethylene) copolymer (POM-C) and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), were exposed to a transient, high-power arc plasma in air. A small fraction of the ablated material drifting away from the arcing volume was deposited on a fixed glass substrate during the total duration of a 2 kA ac current semicycle. In addition, another fraction of the released material was deposited on a second moving substrate to obtain a time-resolved streak 'image' of the arc-induced ablation process. For the first time, mass spectra of degradation fragments produced by arc-induced ablation were obtained from the material deposited on the substrates by using laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LDI-ToF-MS). It was found that oligomers with mean molecular weight ranging between 400 and 600 Da were released from the surface of the studied polymers. The obtained spectra suggest that the detected degradation fragments of POM could be released by random chain scission of the polymer backbone. In turn, random chain scission and splitting-off the side groups are suggested as the main chemical mechanism leading to the release of PMMA fragments under arc-induced ablation., QC 20160223

An efficient algorithm without flux correction for simulation of corona discharges is proposed. The algorithm referred to as the position-state separation method (POSS) is used to solve convection-dominated continuity equations commonly present in corona discharges modelling. The proposed solution method combines an Eulerian scheme for the solution of the convective acceleration, the diffusion and the reaction subproblems, and a Lagrangian scheme for the solution of the linear convection subproblem. Several classical numerical experiments in different dimensions and coordinate systems are conducted to demonstrate the excellent performance of POSS regarding low computational cost, robustness, and high-resolution. It is shown that the time complexity of the method when dealing with the convection of charged particles increases linearly with the number of unknowns. For the simulation of corona discharges where local electric fields do not change strongly in time, the time step of POSS could be much larger than the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy (CFL) time step. These special features enable POSS to have great potential in modeling of corona discharges in long interelectrode gaps and for long simulation times., QC 20160928