Kinetic Modelling of Atmospheric Pressure Corona Discharges in Humid Air

Corona discharge is a self-sustained discharge of gaseous medium in inhomogeneous electric fields, which often occurs on transmission lines and has some adverse effect on the power transmission system. In this paper, a kinetic model of corona discharges is presented to simulate the evolution process of charged particles and neutral species in humid air. To investigate the effect of humidity, our model consists of 69 species and 393 chemical reactions which consider important reactions containing H2O molecules and hydrates. In addition, CO2 molecules are also included to improve the integrity of reaction database. A temporal evolution of reduced electric field strengths E/N, which are typical experimental values of corona discharges, is used as input. The simulation results show that H3O+ is one of the dominant positive ions which is in qualitative agreement with previous experimental results. The effect of humidity and pulse width on the plasma chemistry is also discussed. It is found that the humidity affects the maximum density and life time of the specific species. Meanwhile, the plasma chemistry could be affected by different pulse widths of the input electric field.