Simulating mode transitions during breakdown in liquids

The primary new information from this investigation is the simulation of a transition from one streamer mode to another during propagation. The transition is characteristic of experimental data, but has not heretofore been described in a model. This demonstrates that the conceptual framework describing prebreakdown streamers in liquids as stochastic growth of a branching fractal tree in point-plane geometry is capable of simulating a wide range of streamer propagation behaviors in insulating liquids. The work also improved the approach in the model for scaling the potential at nearby grid points and explored some of the influences of computational choices, specifically needle length and grid size, on the predicted results.