AbstractsEngineering

A technique is devised for corona-pulse intensity calibration of the corona detection circuit employed in the experiments; this calibration scheme may be regarded as a modification of one of the three suggested ASTM calibration methods. The remaining two methods are found to have serious inherent disadvantages and are discarded oh those accounts. A method, developed for the measurement of the corona discharge rate, is extensively used to analyze the sequence of discharge behaviour within spark gaps of various spacings and under different vapour pressures. The discharge rate measurements, in conjunction with toe observations on the voltage waveforms across discharging gaps, show numerous deviations from the idealized hypotheses of Gemant and Whitehead  – the most conspicuous difference being the quasilinear increase of discharge rate with voltage instead of the abrupt jumps predicted by the idealized theory.