Reduced order modelling of streamers and their characterization by macroscopic parameters

Electric discharges in gases occur at various scales, and are of both academic and practical interest for several reasons including understanding natural phenomena such as lightning, and for use in industrial applications. Streamers, self-propagating ionization fronts, are a particularly challenging regime to study. They are difficult to study computationally due to the necessity of resolving disparate length and time scales, and existing methods for understanding single streamers are impractical for scaling up to model the hundreds to thousands of streamers present in a streamer corona. Conversely, methods for simulating the full streamer corona rely on simplified models of single streamers which abstract away much of the relevant physics. This disconnect highlights the need for a simplified model of individual streamers which captures the core dynamics but is scalable to ensembles of many mutually interacting streamers. In this work, several such models are developed.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Pavan, Colin A.(Colin Armstrong)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Carmen Guerra-Garcia.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122379

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122379