Streamers In Nitrogen Research Articles

Simulating streamer discharges in 3D with the parallel adaptive Afivo framework

We present an open-source plasma fluid code for 2D, cylindrical and 3D simulations of streamer discharges. The code is based on the Afivo framework, which features adaptive mesh refinement on quadtree/octree grids, geometric multigrid methods for Poisson’s equation, and OpenMP parallelism. We describe the numerical implementation of a fluid model of the drift-diffusion-reaction type, combined with the local field approximation. Then we demonstrate its functionality with 3D simulations of long positive streamers in nitrogen in undervolted gaps. Three examples are presented. The first one shows how a stochastic background density affects streamer propagation and branching. The second one focuses on the interaction of a streamer with preionized regions, and the third one investigates the interaction between two streamers. The simulations use up to 108 grid cells and run in less than a day; without mesh refinement they would require more than grid cells.

Probing photo-ionization: experiments on positive streamers in pure gases and mixtures

Positive streamers are thought to propagate by photo-ionization; the parameters of photo-ionization depend on the nitrogen : oxygen ratio. Therefore we study streamers in nitrogen with 20%, 0.2% and 0.01% oxygen and in pure nitrogen as well as in pure oxygen and argon. Our new experimental set-up guarantees contamination of the pure gases to be well below 1 ppm. Streamers in oxygen are difficult to measure as they emit considerably less light in the sensitivity range of our fast ICCD camera than the other gases. Streamers in pure nitrogen and in all nitrogen–oxygen mixtures look generally similar, but become somewhat thinner and branch more with decreasing oxygen content. In pure nitrogen the streamers can branch so much that they resemble feathers. This feature is even more pronounced in pure argon, with approximately 102 hair tips cm−3 in the feathers at 200 mbar; this density can be interpreted as the free electron density creating avalanches towards the streamer stem. It is remarkable that the streamer velocity is essentially the same for similar voltage and pressure in all nitrogen–oxygen mixtures as well as in pure nitrogen, while the oxygen concentration and therefore the photo-ionization lengths vary by more than five orders of magnitude. Streamers in argon have essentially the same velocity as well. The physical similarity of streamers at different pressures is confirmed in all gases; the minimal diameters are smaller than in earlier measurements.