Effect of the Shape of the Insulator on Fractal Characteristics of Creeping Discharges

Abstract

This paper studies the use of circular boundary and square boundary configurations for analyzing fractal char- acteristics of creeping discharges over solid dielectric materials. A two dimensional stochastic dielectric breakdown model is used to simulate creeping discharges. The square boundary and the circular boundary represent a square shaped dielectric sample and a circular shaped dielectric sample respectively. These configurations are used to analyze the effect of using different shaped samples for creeping discharge experiment in a laboratory environment. Fractal dimension of the simulated patterns, calculated by box counting method and mass radius relation method are used to analyze the effect of circular shaped and square shaped dielectric samples for creeping discharge analysis.