Corona-induced pressures, potentials, fields and currents in electrostatic precipitator configurations

This paper is aimed at assessing analytically the dc corona induced pressures in wire-cylinder and wire-plate electrostatic precipitator configurations. This calls for solving the equations describing the corona discharge and the force balance for static gas equilibrium provided that the corona onset voltage and the space-charge-free field values are calculable. The calculated pressure and potential distributions along the gap axis in air and nitrogen at atmospheric pressure agreed well with those measured previously. The calculated corona current density values agreed reasonably with those measured for a high-temperature high-pressure wire-cylinder precipitator. The analytically calculated positive and negative dc corona onset voltages for wire-duct precipitators following proposed criteria based on discharge physics are in good agreement with those measured experimentally at atmospheric and lower pressures.