Plasma fluid modeling of microwave streamers: Approximations and accuracy

Abstract

Fluid models of microwave streamers at 110 GHz in atmospheric pressure air predict the formation of filamentary plasma patterns that show a good qualitative agreement with experiments. In order to perform more quantitative comparisons with experiments, in this paper, we study the consequences of different types of approximations that are generally used in the fluid models. We consider here the streamer dynamics before gas heating effects become important, i.e., the first few tens of ns after breakdown at atmospheric pressure. The influence on the results of the local effective field approximation vs. the local mean energy approximation is analyzed in detail. Other approximations that are related to the choice and method of calculation of electron transport parameters are also discussed. It is shown that the local effective field approximation is rather good for a large range of conditions of high frequency breakdown at atmospheric pressure in air while the results may be very sensitive to the choice of transport coefficients.