High-voltage atmospheric breakdown across intervening rutile dielectrics.

Technical Report · Sun Sep 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1096248· OSTI ID:1096248

Williamson, Kenneth Martin; Simpson, Sean; Coats, Rebecca Sue; Jorgenson, Roy Eberhardt; Hjalmarson, Harold Paul; Pasik, Michael Francis

This report documents work conducted in FY13 on electrical discharge experiments performed to develop predictive computational models of the fundamental processes of surface breakdown in the vicinity of high-permittivity material interfaces. Further, experiments were conducted to determine if free carrier electrons could be excited into the conduction band thus lowering the effective breakdown voltage when UV photons (4.66 eV) from a high energy pulsed laser were incident on the rutile sample. This report documents the numerical approach, the experimental setup, and summarizes the data and simulations. Lastly, it describes the path forward and challenges that must be overcome in order to improve future experiments for characterizing the breakdown behavior for rutile.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1096248
• Report Number(s): SAND2013-8279; 476322
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English