That's an interesting paper, I wish I could understand the math better. It seems to treat only the DC case, however. I wonder if there's an AC treatment around somewhere. It'll surely be much messier! One of the guiding assumptions is that the arc is a resistive fluid obeying Ohm's law. Arcs generally don't obey Ohm's law.
As the authors note, the paper is a "useful intermediate step".
Thanks for writing!
bob prohaska
A very helpful description of electrical discharges. It doesn't get much into AC effects, however.
Welding is probably somewhat unique, in that practically all of the work on gaseous electronics was motivated by rectifier and amplifier applications, where the current is varying DC. Nobody was much interested in in the regime corresponding to welding conditions. When things start to melt the tube designers usually used a bigger tube.....
8-)bob p
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