Simulation of the AC corona phenomenon with experimental validation

Abstract

The corona effect, and in particular the Trichel phenomenon, is an important aspect of plasma physics with many technical applications, such as pollution reduction, surface and medical treatments. This phenomenon is also associated with components used in the power industry where it is, in many cases, the source of electro-magnetic disturbance, noise and production of undesired chemically active species. Despite the power industry to date using mainly alternating current (AC) transmission, most of the studies related to the corona effect have been carried out with direct current (DC) sources. Therefore, there is technical interest in validating numerical codes capable of simulating the AC phenomenon. In this work we describe a set of partial differential equations that are comprehensive enough to reproduce the distinctive features of the corona in an AC regime. The model embeds some selectable chemical databases, comprising tens of chemical species and hundreds of reactions, the thermal dynamics of neutral species and photoionization. A large set of parameters—deduced from experiments and numerical estimations—are compared, to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Experimental Characterization of Polymer Surfaces Subject to Corona Discharges in Controlled Atmospheres

“…We have developed a simulation of the experimental setup in Figure 1 for a discharge under air atmosphere. The model is based on numerical techniques previously developed for the simulation of corona discharges [59,60,61,62,63]. The model is based on a set of partial differential equations for the evolution of the concentrations of charged and neutral species coupled with the electrostatic equation.…”

“…The swarm parameters were calculated employing METHES while the cross-sections were obtained from the LXCat project website [65,66]. Further details about the scheme and the techniques employed for modeling of corona discharges can be found in Villa et al [63]. The initial conditions of the simulation are T = 300 K, P = 101,000 Pa, yN2 = 0.79, yO2 = 0.2 and yH2normalO = 0.01.…”

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

“…The second approach is a truncation of the simulation domain for S ph , which is the selection of xi in (18). This approach makes use of the fact that it is not necessary to compute all xi under some circumstances.…”

Multi-scale two-domain numerical modeling of stationary positive DC corona discharge/drift-region coupling

“…Furthermore the detailed physics of the modeling associated with the various non-stationary aspects of corona render its comparison with experimental results (e.g. the so-called Trichel pulses) delicate, either using commercial codes [10] or more elaborated ones [11], albeit feasible in 2D [12]. Nevertheless, at intermediate voltages, above the inception voltage, a steady-state can be sustained, the modeling of which is still difficult when coupled with drift-region.…”