Discontinuous leader development is the most important discharge process under the application of the switching impulse voltage with the low rate of voltage rising, which is of great significance to study the external insulation characteristics of ultra-high voltage (UHV) large scale air gap. Based on the CMOS high-speed camera, a discharge test with different operating impulse voltage is carried out by constructing a comprehensive observation platform of rod-plate air gap discharge, and a clear discontinuous leader development process picture is captured. Moreover, the leader current, injection charge and leader channel unit length charge, and their characteristics of the change trend are also obtained. Further analysis based on the experimental results shows that the discontinuous leader development under the action of the impulse voltage with low rate of voltage rising has two different laws. Finally, this paper uses the thermodynamic equation, combined with the test results, the channel temperature changes in the discontinuous leader development stagnation stage were calculated. The results show that the leader channel temperature is still greater than 1500 K in the hundreds of microsecond time scales in the leader stagnation stage, and the subsequent leader can continue to develop on the original leader channel.
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