Simulation of positive streamer propagation in an air gap with a GFRP composite barrier

Abstract

The puncture of glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) laminate is a primary damage pattern of wind turbine blades due to lightning strikes. A numerical simulation model of positive streamer propagation in a needle-to-plate air gap with a GFRP laminate is established to investigate the breakdown mechanism of GFRP laminate. The model not only considers the dynamics of charged particles in the air and the composite laminate, but also the current continuity at gas-solid interfaces. The simulated streamer discharge pattern and the surface streamer length are in good agreement with the observation results. The distributions and evolutions of the electron number density, electric field, and surface charge densities during streamer propagation are obtained. It is found that the enhancement of the electric field on the GFRP laminate is caused by the rapid deposition of positive and negative space charges on the GFRP laminate after a secondary streamer incepts on the lower surface of the GFRP laminate. The effects of the applied voltage, relative permittivity, and thickness of the GFRP laminate on the electric field on the GFRP laminate are investigated. The obtained results could assist in further understanding of the mechanism of GFRP wind blade breakdown due to lightning strikes.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Adaptive strategies to fast multipole method in photoionisation calculations for streamer discharges

“…The stopping criterion for the algebraic elliptic solver is also identical to Ref. [36], where the relative residual less than 10 −8 for the Poisson equation and 10 −6 for the other elliptic equations about photoionisation (i.e., (6), (11) and ( 12)). The second-order explicit method is adopted for the temporal integration, which evaluates both ϕ and S ph twice at each time step.…”

“…These parameters have a better fitting compared with N E = 2 and are convenient for our numerical comparison in Section 4. Zero boundary conditions are adopted for all S ph,j in (6) as used in [30].…”

“…Streamer discharge is an important building block of gas discharges. As a natural phenomenon, it is the precursor of sparks [1,2] and lightning leaders in lower altitude [3][4][5][6][7] and can also be observed and captured directly, for example, the sprites in high altitude [8,9]. As a product of streamer discharges, the non-thermal atmospheric plasma paves the way to a large number of chemical reactions in applications such as the pollution control [10], solubilisation of carbon nano-material [11,12] and disinfection [13,14].…”

Research of cycloaliphatic epoxy resin and silicone rubber composite insulator interface based on four‐electrode system and temperature rise model

“…As a common failure of composite insulators, decay-like fracture can lead to the trip of transmission line and destroy power system stability [5][6][7][8]. It is considered to be related to the interface state [9][10][11][12]. The weak adhesion and liquid in the interface are the direct factors for the internal discharge and core ageing.…”

Positive and negative streamers in air and nitrogen in a sharply inhomogeneous electric field under conditions of runaway electron generation

“…This indicates a sufficiently high level of preliminary ionisation of gas ahead of ionisation front, which ensures the overlap of avalanches. The existing models describe well the formation of such streamers in air, where the gas preionisation is provided due to the ionisation of oxygen molecules by the radiation of nitrogen molecules [30][31][32][33][34]. However, difficulties arise in pure gases [35].…”