Temperature and pressure effects on positive streamers in air

Abstract

In this paper we investigate temperature and pressure effects on the properties of a positive pulsed streamer plasma. We use a corona plasma setup in which we vary the temperature between 303 and 773 K at atmospheric pressure and the pressure between 37.9 and 100 kPa at room temperature to achieve the same neutral gas density and compare electrical and optical (ICCD imaging) measurements carried out in both experiments. From the measurements we found that the dissipated plasma energy and the average streamer propagation velocity are both higher for the temperature experiments at the same neutral gas densities as in the pressure experiments. This suggests the existence of a specific temperature effect. A possible explanation for this effect is a higher streamer conductivity at high temperatures, as was previously found in the literature. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.