Derivation of a merging condition for two interacting streamers in air

Abstract

The simulation of the interaction of two simultaneously propagating air streamers of the same polarity is presented. A parametric study has been carried out using an accurate numerical method which ensures a time-space error control of the solution. For initial separation of both streamers smaller or comparable to the longest characteristic absorption length of photoionization in air, we have found that the streamers tend to merge at the moment when the ratio between their characteristic width and their mutual distance reaches a value of about 0.35 for positive streamers, and 0.4 for negative ones. Moreover it is demonstrated that these ratios are practically independent of the applied electric field, the initial seed configuration, and the pressure.

References in corpus (2)

• Interaction of streamers in air and other oxygen-nitrogen mixtures
• Construction and test of a moving boundary model for negative streamer discharges

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Growing discharge trees with self-consistent charge transport: the collective dynamics of streamers
• A numerical strategy to discretize and solve the Poisson equation on dynamically adapted multiresolution grids for time-dependent streamer discharge simulations
• Predicting Streamer Discharge Front Splitting by Ionization Seed Profiling