Different Phenomena in UV-Induced Surface Flashover

Much of the work in the area of surface flashover of the past few decades has been devoted into determining which parameters are important in predicting flashover behavior, and the theoretical understanding involved in the process is not yet mature. In this paper, the flashover performance of the insulator in vacuum was studied in the UV-laser-illuminated case. A testbed comprised of a pulsed high-voltage supply, a vacuum chamber, and an excimer laser was assembled to test the flashover performance under pulsed-voltage and UV-laser irradiation. Two different voltage decrease patterns were measured, implying some underlying information of the flashover mechanism. In addition, a circuit model was used to simplify the surface flashover system, and the simulation results seem pretty good with the experimental results.