• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.397-401
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• 2011

The response of lightning impulse voltage was explored in dielectric liquids employing hydrodynamic modeling with three charge carriers using the finite element method. To understand the physical behavior of discharge phenomena in dielectric liquids, the response of step voltage has been extensively studied recently using numerical techniques. That of lightning impulse voltage, however, has rarely been investigated in technical literature. Therefore, in this paper, we tested impulse response with a tip-sphere electrode which is explained in IEC standard #60897 in detail. Electric field-dependent molecular ionization is a common term for the breakdown process, so two ionization factors were tested and compared for selecting a suitable coefficient with the lightning impulse voltage. To stabilize our numerical setup, the artificial diffusion technique was adopted, and finer mesh segmentation was generated along with the axial axis. We found that the velocity from the numerical result agrees with that from the experimental result on lightning impulse breakdown testing in the literature.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.7
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• pp.1276-1281
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• 2010

To analyze the gas discharge phenomena in parallel-plane electrodes, the fully coupled finite element method (FEM) considering secondary electron emission effects in discharge column was adopted in this paper. Two coupled equations of the hydrodynamic diffusion-drift equations for three carriers and the Poisson's equation for electric scalar potential should be solved as a system equation. The proposed method including two secondary electron processes of the photoemission and background ionization has been successfully applied to evaluating the breakdown voltage in parallel-plane electrodes and is verified by comparing its numerical results with the experimental ones. From the obtained results, it is inferred that the proposed numerical scheme will be useful for predicting and understanding streamer transient phenomena.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.97-102
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• 2012

To predict accurately the breakdown voltage in air at atmospheric pressure, a fully coupled finite element analysis combining the hydrodynamic diffusion-drift equations with Poisson's equation is proposed in the current paper. As three kinds of charged transport particles are nonlinearly coupled with spatial electric fields, the equations should be solved by an iterative numerical scheme, in which secondary effects, such as photoemission and photoionization, are considered. The proposed method has been successfully applied to evaluate the breakdown voltage in circular parallel-plane electrodes. Its validity has been proved through the comparison of the predicted and experimental results. The effects of numerical conditions of the initial charge, photoemission, and background ionization on the discharge phenomena are quantitatively assessed through Taguchi's design of experiment method.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.307-312
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• 2014

We present a full finite element analysis for plasma discharge in etching process of semiconductor circuit. The charge transport equations of hydrodynamic diffusion-drift model and the electric field equation were numerically solved in a fully coupled system by using a standard finite element procedure for transient analysis. The proposed method was applied to a real plasma reactor in order to characterize the plasma sheath that is closely related to the yield of the etching process. Throughout the plasma discharge analysis, the base electrode of reactor was tested and modified for improving the uniformity around the wafer edge. The experiment and numerical results were examined along with SEM data of etching quality. The feasibility and usefulness of the proposed method was shown by both numerical and experimental results.