Blazing a fiery trail with the hounds

This study investigates pre-breakdown streamers in organic liquids. The energy needed to generate a unit volume of the expanding streamer is obtained by adding the terms corresponding to the various processes involved. i. e. vaporization, decomposition, ionization, displacement. It is shown that the measured charge of a streamer is comparable to that of a conducting sphere enclosing all of the branches, irrespective of speed and shape. Thus, the main differences between modes are related to current intensity and actual volume.