Reduced order model for a streamer discharge in air

Abstract:
Lightning involves complex physical processes in atmospheric discharges, beginning with the development of streamer discharges. Therefore, to understand the mechanism of streamer discharges, it is important to develop a computationally efficient and an accurate numerical model. In this paper, we present the results of a 1.5-dimensional (1.5D) streamer discharge simulation using the well-established explicit finite difference method (FD) with flux-corrected transport (FCT) method. The method was applied to a streamer propagating in a 1.25cm plane-plane air gap in standard atmos-pheric pressure and temperature. We compared our results to those from a previously published two-dimensional (2D) axisymmetric streamer paper which is focused on the same air gap but using different numerical approaches. One can observe that the electric field is obtained with good accuracy in this 1.5D numerical simulation. The streamer position and the streamer bridging time agree with 2D results. This model has the potential to deal with moving non-uniform meshes.