159 research outputs found
Inception and propagation of positive streamers in high-purity nitrogen: effects of the voltage rise-rate
Controlling streamer morphology is important for numerous applications. Up to
now, the effect of the voltage rise rate was only studied across a wide range.
Here we show that even slight variations in the voltage rise can have
significant effects. We have studied positive streamer discharges in a 16 cm
point-plane gap in high-purity nitrogen 6.0, created by 25 kV pulses with a
duration of 130 ns. The voltage rise varies by a rise rate from 1.9 kV/ns to
2.7 kV/ns and by the first peak voltage of 22 to 28 kV. A structural link is
found between smaller discharges with a larger inception cloud caused by a
faster rising voltage. This relation is explained by the greater stability of
the inception cloud due to a faster voltage rise, causing a delay in the
destabilisation. Time-resolved measurements show that the inception cloud
propagates slower than an earlier destabilised, more filamentary discharge.
This explains that the discharge with a faster rising voltage pulse ends up to
be shorter. Furthermore, the effect of remaining background ionisation in a
pulse sequence has been studied, showing that channel thickness and branching
rate are locally affected, depending on the covered volume of the previous
discharge.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure
An Efficient, Repetitive Nanosecond Pulsed Power Generator with Ten Synchronized Spark Gap Switches
Analytic expressions and approximations for the onaxis, aberration-free Rayleigh and Debye integral in the case of focusing fields on a circular aperture
We present a derivation of the analytic result for on-axis field values of the Rayleigh diffraction integral, a result that was originally presented in a paper b
Probing photo-ionization: Experiments on positive streamers in pure gasses and mixtures
Positive streamers are thought to propagate by photo-ionization whose
parameters depend on the nitrogen:oxygen ratio. Therefore we study streamers in
nitrogen with 20%, 0.2% and 0.01% oxygen and in pure nitrogen, as well as in
pure oxygen and argon. Our new experimental set-up guarantees contamination of
the pure gases to be well below 1 ppm. Streamers in oxygen are difficult to
measure as they emit considerably less light in the sensitivity range of our
fast ICCD camera than the other gasses. Streamers in pure nitrogen and in all
nitrogen/oxygen mixtures look generally similar, but become somewhat thinner
and branch more with decreasing oxygen content. In pure nitrogen the streamers
can branch so much that they resemble feathers. This feature is even more
pronounced in pure argon, with approximately 10^2 hair tips/cm^3 in the
feathers at 200 mbar; this density could be interpreted as the free electron
density creating avalanches towards the streamer stem. It is remarkable that
the streamer velocity is essentially the same for similar voltage and pressure
in all nitrogen/oxygen mixtures as well as in pure nitrogen, while the oxygen
concentration and therefore the photo-ionization lengths vary by more than five
orders of magnitude. Streamers in argon have essentially the same velocity as
well. The physical similarity of streamers at different pressures is confirmed
in all gases; the minimal diameters are smaller than in earlier measurements.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figures. Major differences with v1: - appendix and
spectra removed - subsection regarding effects of repetition frequency added
- many more smaller change
Translational regulation shapes the molecular landscape of complex disease phenotypes.
The extent of translational control of gene expression in mammalian tissues remains largely unknown. Here we perform genome-wide RNA sequencing and ribosome profiling in heart and liver tissues to investigate strain-specific translational regulation in the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR/Ola). For the most part, transcriptional variation is equally apparent at the translational level and there is limited evidence of translational buffering. Remarkably, we observe hundreds of strain-specific differences in translation, almost doubling the number of differentially expressed genes. The integration of genetic, transcriptional and translational data sets reveals distinct signatures in 3'UTR variation, RNA-binding protein motifs and miRNA expression associated with translational regulation of gene expression. We show that a large number of genes associated with heart and liver traits in human genome-wide association studies are primarily translationally regulated. Capturing interindividual differences in the translated genome will lead to new insights into the genes and regulatory pathways underlying disease phenotypes
Positive and negative streamers in ambient air: modeling evolution and velocities
We simulate short positive and negative streamers in air at standard
temperature and pressure. They evolve in homogeneous electric fields or emerge
from needle electrodes with voltages of 10 to 20 kV. The streamer velocity at
given streamer length depends only weakly on the initial ionization seed,
except in the case of negative streamers in homogeneous fields. We characterize
the streamers by length, head radius, head charge and field enhancement. We
show that the velocity of positive streamers is mainly determined by their
radius and in quantitative agreement with recent experimental results both for
radius and velocity. The velocity of negative streamers is dominated by
electron drift in the enhanced field; in the low local fields of the present
simulations, it is little influenced by photo-ionization. Though negative
streamer fronts always move at least with the electron drift velocity in the
local field, this drift motion broadens the streamer head, decreases the field
enhancement and ultimately leads to slower propagation or even extinction of
the negative streamer.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure
Probing photo-ionization: simulations of positive streamers in varying N2:O2 mixtures
Photo-ionization is the accepted mechanism for the propagation of positive
streamers in air though the parameters are not very well known; the efficiency
of this mechanism largely depends on the presence of both nitrogen and oxygen.
But experiments show that streamer propagation is amazingly robust against
changes of the gas composition; even for pure nitrogen with impurity levels
below 1 ppm streamers propagate essentially with the same velocity as in air,
but their minimal diameter is smaller, and they branch more frequently.
Additionally, they move more in a zigzag fashion and sometimes exhibit a
feathery structure. In our simulations, we test the relative importance of
photo-ionization and of the background ionization from pulsed repetitive
discharges, in air as well as in nitrogen with 1 ppm O2 . We also test
reasonable parameter changes of the photo-ionization model. We find that photo-
ionization dominates streamer propagation in air for repetition frequencies of
at least 1 kHz, while in nitrogen with 1 ppm O2 the effect of the repetition
frequency has to be included above 1 Hz. Finally, we explain the feather-like
structures around streamer channels that are observed in experiments in
nitrogen with high purity, but not in air.Comment: 12 figure
Multiple-gap spark gap switch
A triggered multiple-gap spark gap switch has been developed and tested under atmosphere. By means of an LCR trigger circuit, the multiple-gap switch can be used very reliably. For the same switching voltage (35.5 kV), with increasing the number of gaps from 2 to 6, the switching current rise time is reduced from 13.5 to 6 ns, and the energy efficiency is increased from 87% to 92%. An eight-gap switch was also tested, and the switching current rise time is much smaller than the usable rise time of the current probe (3.5 ns). One interesting application of the multiple-gap switch is to improve the switching performance in the multiple-switch and transmission lines based pulsed power circuit. To verify this application, a six-gap switch was tested. In contrast to a single-gap switch, the output current rise time was improved from 21 to 11 ns by the six-gap switch
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