Modelling of electrostatic treatment of flue gases

The growing concern about the quality of the environment has led many research laboratories and electricity boards to devote more and more attention to new technologies for the removal of polluting agents from industrial flue gases, namely the fly ash and the acid rain precursors NO_x and SO₂. The Italian program on `Flue gas clean-up´ is mainly devoted to testing and developing new techniques and operating procedures for reducing pollutant effluent concentrations within the permissible limits proposed by the Commission of the European Communities. The research effort is mainly devoted to developing electrostatic precipitator based systems. In this paper, these techniques are briefly described and the simulation models developed in order to understand the basic plasma processes and to guide the engineering development are described