Saint Elmo’s Fire Corona by Using HVDC, HVAC ...

In this paper, corona inception voltages of the Saint Elmo’s fire corona in non-uniform field were studied by high voltage DC (HVDC), high voltage AC (HVAC) and Tesla coil for generating Saint Elmo’s fire corona to strike the classical ship model at high voltage research laboratory in Khon Kaen university, Thailand. In the experiment, the scale of classical ship is 1:500. The gap spacing of artificial cloud and electrode ship mast blade is varied in the range of 50-300 mm. The artificial cloud with high electric field is generated by means of HVDC, HVAC and Tesla coil generator. The results show that there is a good agreement between experimental and calculation. For long air terminal ship mast about 30 cm, the strike occurs in the ship of 110, 127 and 55 kV by HVDC, HVAC and Tesla coil, respectively. In the case of short to high gap of 0-300 mm, the Saint Elmo’s fire phenomenon can only appear on the Tesla coil generator.