The Prospects of Theoretical Lines for Studying Streamers in Air (Review)

The article opens a series of papers to be published by the team of researchers at the NRU MPEI Department of High Voltage Engineering and Electrophysics on their theoretical investigations into the branching and parallel development of cathode-directed (positive) streamers in air. Papers published for the period from 1979 to 2022 on the fundamentals of the streamer discharge theory and its application in high-voltage electrical technologies, agriculture, and medicine are briefly reviewed. The potential role of streamer branching in these applications is explained. The currently known concepts of streamer branching in air are outlined. Their substantiation in physical and computational experiments is estimated. It is concluded that the concept explaining the branching by the development of large electron avalanches in the electric field of streamer heads has been confirmed convincingly. A series of computational experiments is proposed to study the branching of individual streamers, the interaction of simultaneously developing branches, and to determine their influence on the discharge parameters. The results obtained will be published in the subsequent articles of this series.