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Kinetic Modelling of Atmospheric Pressure Corona Discharges in Humid Air

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Abstract

Corona discharge is a self-sustained discharge of gaseous medium in inhomogeneous electric fields, which often occurs on transmission lines and has some adverse effect on the power transmission system. In this paper, a kinetic model of corona discharges is presented to simulate the evolution process of charged particles and neutral species in humid air. To investigate the effect of humidity, our model consists of 69 species and 393 chemical reactions which consider important reactions containing H2O molecules and hydrates. In addition, CO2 molecules are also included to improve the integrity of reaction database. A temporal evolution of reduced electric field strengths E/N, which are typical experimental values of corona discharges, is used as input. The simulation results show that H3O+ is one of the dominant positive ions which is in qualitative agreement with previous experimental results. The effect of humidity and pulse width on the plasma chemistry is also discussed. It is found that the humidity affects the maximum density and life time of the specific species. Meanwhile, the plasma chemistry could be affected by different pulse widths of the input electric field.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51607061, 51677061) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (531118040072).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

    Lanbo Wang, She Chen & Feng Wang

  2. College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Yili Normal University, Yining, 835000, China

    Feng Wang

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Correspondence to She Chen.

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Appendix: Reaction List

Appendix: Reaction List

Table 2 lists all chemical reactions considered in this paper. Rate coefficients are in units of s−1, cm3 s−1 and cm6 s−1 for one, two, and three-body reactions, respectively. The ion temperature Ti (K) is given by

$$T_{i} = T + \alpha_{i} \left( {E/N} \right)^{2}$$

where αi = 0.13 K Td−2. The effective temperature of ions colliding with neutrals is defined as

$$Teff_{j} = \frac{{m_{i} T + m_{j} T_{i} }}{{m_{i} + m_{j} }}$$

where mi and mj are the masses of the ion and neutral components involved in the reaction.

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Wang, L., Chen, S. & Wang, F. Kinetic Modelling of Atmospheric Pressure Corona Discharges in Humid Air. Plasma Chem Plasma Process 39, 1291–1315 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11090-019-10006-9

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