Online monitoring of Partial Discharges (PDs) in rotating electrical machines is an useful tool for machine prognosis, as it presents reduced costs compared to intrusive inspections and associated with relevant problems. Although this method has been developed almost 50 years, the recent advancements processes automation signal processing techniques allow improvements that are still being studi...

Abstract – In this paper, the effect of applied electric field on the damage due to partial discharges activity into the surroundings dielectrics of a narrow channel encapsulated within the volume of a dielectric material is evaluated using a kinetic model based on Particle in Cell - Monte Carlo Collision (PIC-MCC) model. After application of an electric field across a dielectric material which...

Partial discharges are localized electric discharges that do not bridge the electrodes. For high voltage components measurements of partial discharges are commonly used to diagnose the condition of the insulation system. Traditionally partial discharges are measured at a single frequency of the applied voltage. However the rather newly developed technique of Variable Frequency Phase Resolved Pa...

Streamer discharges are a primary mode of electric breakdown in thunderstorms and high voltage technology; they are generally believed to grow along electric field lines. However, we here give experimental and numerical evidence that streamers can propagate nearly perpendicularly to the background electric field. These streamers are guided by pre-ionization that is orders of magnitude lower tha...

The Enhanced Dα or EDA H-mode regime in Alcator C-Mod has been investigated and compared in detail to ELM-free plasmas. (In this paper, ELM-free will refer to discharges with no type I ELMs and with no sign of EDA, though technically, most EDA plasmas are ELM-free as well.) EDA discharges have only slightly lower energy confinement than comparable ELM-free ones, but show markedly reduced impuri...

Elucidating the origins of complex biological structures has been one of the major challenges of evolutionary studies. Within vertebrates, the capacity to produce regular coordinated electric organ discharges (EODs) has evolved independently in different fish lineages. Intermediate stages, however, are not known. We show that, within a single catfish genus, some species are able to produce soun...

A report is made on a comprehensive observation of a burstlike gamma-ray emission from thunderclouds on the Sea of Japan, during strong thunderstorms on 6 January 2007. The detected emission, lasting for approximately 40 sec, preceded cloud-to-ground lightning discharges. The burst spectrum, extending to 10 MeV, can be interpreted as consisting of bremsstrahlung photons originating from relativ...