The humidity effect on the breakdown voltage characteristics and the transport parameters of air

Abstract

This paper contains experimental results for the direct current (DC) breakdown voltages and calculated transport parameters for dry, synthetic and ambient air. The breakdown voltage curves for dry, ambient and synthetic air at the gap size of 100μm are very similar. The differences between them are much more pronounced at the interelectrode separation of 20μm, especially at the right hand branch of the breakdown voltage curves. On the other hand, the effective yields γ for dry and synthetic air are in disagreement at lower values of the E/p. Results of calculations based on the Two Term Approximation indicate that the humidity has no a great influence on the transport parameters at all range of the reduce field E/N.