An experimental investigation of pulsed multichannel discharge across solid insulators

An experimental study of pulsed surface flashover across a solid insulator in a vacuum is reported, with application of fast impulse voltages of a few tens of ns rise time and a few microsec tail time. Following the flashover voltage experiments, no visible degradation of the surface was found for the BaTiO3 sample, whereas for the TiO2 sample a distinct track mark could be seen where the flashover occurred. Three schemes for obtaining multichannel discharges were studied for plexiglass specimens, and results showed the number of shots to decrease as the number of channels increased.