A thermal model of positive pre-breakdown streamers in insulating liquids

It has been shown that, in nonvolatile fluids, the column of a positive prebreakdown streamer behaves like a region of hot liquid. This is demonstrated by the following experiment: a short high voltage pulse is used to generate the streamer, and after a time delay a flash pulse illuminates the gap. Flash photographs taken over a wide range of delay intervals make it possible to study the decay of the streamer column. The decay process follows a thermal model in which the decay time scales with the square of the column diameter and inversely as thermal diffusivity