Possible existence of an 'overheating' temperature turbulence

The development of an overheating instability in a medium with nonlinear bulk heat evolution is investigated analytically. A semiempirical model is developed for the case of a laminar electric arc in a gas at rest, using the energy equation derived by Nedospasov and Khait (1979), writing all quantities as sums of average and fluctuating components, and employing an analogy to strong hydrodynamic turbulence. An approximate solution is obtained and shown to account for the experimental results of Chien and Benenson (1980) for a dc arc in Ar at atmospheric pressure. A relationship between the overheating turbulence described by the model and one type of flicker noise is suggested.