Stochastic simulation of particle charging and collection characteristics for a wire-plate electrostatic precipitator of short length

In order to estimate more exactly the performance of wire-plate electrostatic precipitators (ESP), a new computational scheme has been developed, where the involved physical phenomena such as corona-field, turbulent electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow field, in situ particle charging and turbulent motion of particles are treated simultaneously. To overcome the deficiencies of the Eulerian method used up to now, a Lagrangian particle-tracking method coupled with the Monte-Carlo method for simulating the stochastic nature of turbulence is used. The scheme is applied to the analysis of an experimental wire-plate ESP of short length (Kihm, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, 1987), where the effect of developing flow in the entrance region is substantial. The simulation results for two different flow conditions of high and low turbulent intensity at the inlet clearly reproduced the steeper increase of efficiency with voltage for low turbulence case observed in the experiment, and also the efficiency values agree very well with the experimental data for one particle size of 4 μm.