Simulation of Streamer Discharges Across Solid Dielectric Surfaces Using the Open-Source FEniCS Platform

Abstract

Modelling the development of streamer discharges across gas-solid dielectric interfaces is of increasing importance to the power and pulsed power industries. Deeper understanding of the dynamics and morphology of fast ionisation fronts in gases and at gas-solid interfaces underpins insulation coordination and optimization in high voltage power and pulsed power systems. However, many physical mechanisms behind gas-solid flashover remain to be fully understood. In this work, an adaptive mesh drift diffusion solver implemented on the open-source finite element framework FEniCS is used to perform computational streamer modelling across gas-solid interfaces. In this study, we verify our implementation by performing studies under a published configuration of a positive streamer initiating and propagating along a flat dielectric surface in a 2D domain. FEn-iCS is proved fully capable of performing streamer simulations in complex gas-solid topologies, with our results providing further evidence of accelerated surface streamers and other observed effects under various initial seed positions, surface permittivity, and applied voltage magnitudes.