Modeling of Corona Discharge in Wire-duct Electrostatic Precipitators

This book is aimed at investigating how the performance of wire-duct precipitators is influenced by the number of discharge wires, the wires' radius and the spacing between wires and the collecting plates. The precipitator performance is expressed in terms of the onset voltage of corona on discharge wires and the corona current voltage characteristic of the precipitators. The initiation of the corona discharge on the wire surface is located around the periphery of each wire. The onset voltage is measured for a laboratory model of a precipitator and calculated based on the criterion of self-recurrence of electron avalanches growing in the vicinity of the discharge wires. This calls for calculating the electric field in the vicinity of the discharge wires using the charge simulation method. The calculated onset voltage values agreed reasonably with those measured experimentally. A finite element method (FEM) has been adopted to model the corona characteristics in duct-type electrostatic precipitators (ESPs) with multi-discharge wires. In this way, Deutsch’s assumption is waived from the solution of the describing equations of the ionized field in the precipitator volume.