Investigation of discharge process for argon spark switch at atmospheric pressure

Abstract

In this paper, a 2D fluid switch model for argon spark switch at atmospheric pressure was established and the detailed discharge process was numerically investigated. The distributions of physical quantities such as electric field strength, electron density, particle density, electron temperature and electron migration velocity at different time were obtained. It is shown that at the initial moment of the discharge process, the electrons move from the cathode to the anode under the action of the external electric field. As the electric field strength increases, the streamer is first formed at the anode and rapidly propagates to the cathode, which finally forms streamer breakdown. The electron temperature starts to rise slowly near the location of anode and cathode, then decreases near the anode and rapidly transfers to the cathode. In addition, the repeated pulse discharge experiment based on the gas switch model was preliminarily carried out. And the current waveform and amplitude obtained by numerical simulation are basically consistent with the experimental results. The results indicate that the present research might provide theoretical basis for the study on the discharge process of gas spark switch.