Streamers sliding on a water surface

The features of an electrical interaction between surface streamers (thin current filaments) sliding on a liquid and liquid itself are still unknown in many details. This paper presents the experimental results on properties of the surface streamers sliding on water with different conductivity (distilled and tap water). The streamers were initiated with a sharpened thin metallic needle placed above the liquid and stressed with a periodical or pulsed high voltage. Two electrode systems were used and tested. The first of them provides in advance the existence of the longitudinal electric field above the water. The second one imitates the electrode geometry of a pin-to-plane dielectric barrier discharge in which the barrier is a thick layer of liquid. The electrical and optical characteristics of streamers were complemented with data on the spectroscopic measurements. It was revealed that surface streamers on water have no spatial memory