Electrical Breakdown in Hydrogen at Low Pressures

Transition from Townsend to glow discharge: Subcritical, mixed, or supercritical characteristics

“…The same model was previously investigated in, e.g., [13,21,22,[26][27][28][29][30] as discussed in the introduction. The model consists of continuity equations for two charged species, namely electrons and positive ions with particle densities n e and n + ∂ t n e + ∂ X J e = source ,…”

“…(27). Following u = u(j) along a line of fixed system size L, we get the current-voltage-characteristics for this particular system characterized by the two parameters L and γ.…”

“…Numerical calculations date back to the 50'ies [26], the first numerical evaluations using an "electronic computer" can be found in the early 60'ies in [27,28]. In particular, in the work of Ward [28], current-voltage characteristics with or without a region of negative differential conductivity can be found for different values of pd.…”

“…In general, our aim in the present paper is a consistent theoretical investigation of the simple classical model of these discharges treated by so many authors [13,18,19,21,22,[26][27][28][29][30]. The exploration of the full parameter space is possible, because the current-voltage characteristics in appropriate dimensionless units depends essentially only on two parameters: the secondary emission coefficent γ and the dimensionless system size L ∝ pd.…”

Numerical computation of the temporal development of currents in a gas discharge tube

“…The discussion of the results in section 6 is restricted to th e more mathematical questions like the influence of truncation errors, and certain other errors occmring during the computations. A discussion of the physical signifi cance of the results is given by A. L. Ward [10,11) .…”