Related papers: Streamers in air splitting into three branches
This proceedings paper from 2004 contains figures of discharges in different gap lengths at the same potential that are not available elsewhere. The 2004 abstract: The evolution of streamers is known to depend on gas composition and…
Standard photographs of streamer discharges show a two-dimensional projection. We here present stereo-photographic images that resolve their three-dimensional structure. We describe the stereoscopic set-up and evaluation, and we present…
Streamer discharges are the primary mode of electric breakdown of air in lightning and high voltage technology. Streamer channels branch many times, which determines the developing tree-like discharge structure. Understanding these branched…
Streamer discharges are thin plasma channels that precede lightning and sparks. They usually evolve in bundles as stochastic tree-like structures and are inherently difficult to model due to their multiscale nature. In this paper, we…
Branching is an essential element of streamer discharge dynamics but today it is understood only qualitatively. The variability and irregularity observed in branched streamer trees suggest that stochastic terms are relevant for the…
Streamers are a generic mode of electric breakdown of large gas volumes. They play a role in the initial stages of sparks and lightning, in technical corona reactors and in high altitude sprite discharges above thunderclouds. Streamers are…
Positive and negative streamers are studied in ambient air at 1 bar; they emerge from a needle electrode placed 40 mm above a planar electrode. The amplitudes of the applied voltage pulses range from 5 to 96 kV; most pulses have rise times…
We recently have shown that a negative streamer in a sufficiently high homogeneous field can branch spontaneously due to a Laplacian instability, rather than approach a stationary mode of propagation with fixed radius. In our previous…
We compare simulations and experiments of single positive streamer discharges in air at 100 mbar, aiming towards model validation. Experimentally, streamers are generated in a plate-plate geometry with a protruding needle. We are able to…
We present the first analytical and numerical studies of the initial stage of the branching process based on an interface dynamics streamer model in the fully 3-D case. This model follows from fundamental considerations on charge production…
We use numerical simulations to study the dynamics of surface discharges, which are common in high-voltage engineering. We simulate positive streamer discharges that propagate towards a dielectric surface, attach to it, and then propagate…
Photographs show distinct differences between positive streamers in air or in a nitrogen-oxygen mixture (0.2% O2). The streamers in the mixture branch more frequently, but the branches also extinguish more easily. Probably related to that,…
In this review we describe a transient type of gas discharge which is commonly called a streamer discharge, as well as a few related phenomena in pulsed discharges. Streamers are propagating ionization fronts with self-organized field…
In sufficiently large gaps and electric fields, discharge streamers do branch. In [Arrayas et al., PRL 88, 174502 (2002)], we observed streamer branching numerically within a deterministic particle density model and explained it as a…
Pictures show that streamer or sprite discharge channels emerging from the same electrode sometimes seem to reconnect or merge though their heads carry electric charge of the same polarity; one might therefore suspect that reconnections are…
Previous studies of streamer discharge branching mechanisms have mainly been generative other than predictive. To predict or even control branching, a reliable connection between experimental conditions and streamer branching needs to be…
We study the effect of an inhomogeneous gas density on positive streamer discharges in air using a 3D fluid model with stochastic photoionization, generalizing earlier work with a 2D axisymmetric model by Starikovskiy and Aleksandrov (2019…
We study how external magnetic fields from 0 to 40 T influence positive streamers in atmospheric pressure air, using 3D PIC-MCC (particle-in-cell, Monte Carlo collision) simulations. When a magnetic field $\vec{B}$ is applied perpendicular…
Positive streamers in ambient air at pressures from 0.013 to 1 bar are investigated experimentally. The voltage applied to the anode needle ranges from 5 to 45 kV, the discharge gap from 1 to 16 cm. Using a "slow" voltage rise time of 100…
Streamer discharges are often operated in a repetitively pulsed mode and are therefore influenced by species left over from the previous discharge, especially free electrons and ions. We have investigated these effects by applying two…