Simulation of the local electric field at the tips of a growing streamer at the breakdown in liquid dielectric

The simulations of the growth of branching streamer structures were performed for the electrode gap of the length up to 1 mm in a point - plane geometry. The stochastic model of growth developed earlier was used. The parallel algorithm for Graphic Processing Units (GPU) was specially designed for high-performance computations of the electric field, the charge transfer and the stochastic growth. This allowed us to perform the simulations on very large lattices with the sizes not less than 400×400×400 nodes for the time intervals of order of 1 microsecond. The simulations were performed at the realistic physical scales in space and in time for the first time. The estimations of the electric field strength at the tips of the growing streamer as well as the average conductivity of streamer channels were made for the streamers with velocities about 5 km/s. The electric field at the streamer tips of about 20 MV/cm was approximately constant during the growth.