LAUSR

The trajectories and branching of electrical discharges through gaseous atmospheres, such as lightning and coronal emissions from high-voltage electromachinery, are of interest in a variety of applications. Multiple branches can evolve in an initially poor atmospheric conductor when a strong electrical discharge builds up, then propagates through the atmosphere by dielectric breakdown. Multiple branches can be generated in gases because of the disordered character of the media at the microscale, with an overall influence occurring from the ambient electric fields. In this paper, we develop a sufficiently flexible computational model to describe discharge trajectory and branching. The framework allows analysts to rapidly simulate thousands of electrical discharge scenarios, in order to statistically explore the dependency of the overall system behavior on the relevant physical parameters.