Influence of Memory on the Statistics of Pulsating Corona

Abstract

It has been shown in the recent work of Van Brunt and Kulkarni (1990) that the well known pulsating negative corona (Trichel pulse) discharge in electronegative gases is a stochastic process in which memory effects play an important role. A complete understanding of this phenomenon cannot be achieved without information about these memory effects which are associated with the influence of negative-ion space charge and metastable species from previous discharge pulses on the initiation and growth of subsequent pulses. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how information about memory can be obtained from measurements of various conditional discharge pulse-amplitude and pulse-time-separation distributions. The discharge phenomenon is represented here by a random point process corresponding to the set {q ₁,q _n, △t _n-1}, n = 2,3,4,… of pulse amplitudes, q _n, and time separations, △t _n-1. Here △t _n-1 is the time separation between the nth and (n - 1)st discharge pulses.