Analysis of the electric field in the co-axial cylindrical Electrostatic Precipitator

The analysis method of the electric field strength in the industry use electrostatic precipitator (EP) is required. The present study is devoted to the establishment of a calculation method for the electric field strength in EP with any electrode structure. As the first step, this calculation method was attempted in the co-axial cylindrical EP for which the calculation was not difficult. The calculation of the electric field strength is performed with the method of successive approximation. In general, it is difficult to determine the boundary conditions in the calculation of the corona electric field. Therefore, as the boundary condition we used the approximate values which can be easily calculated for any electrode. Namely, in order to determine the boundary condition for the space charge density on the discharge electrode, we adopted the corona electric field strength in the vicinity of the discharge electrode instead of the corona onset field strength. We carried out experiments to confirm the reliability of this calculation. The electric field strength was determined by measuring the charge on the spherical steel balls dropped through the corona electric field. The most suitable charging time of the steel ball was determined experimentally in order to increase the accuracy of the measured values. A satisfactory agreement was obtained in the comparison of the calculated values with the measured ones and with the values evaluated from the theoretical equation which was derived by Uhlman and Mayer. It might be concluded that this calculation method is applicable to the analysis of the electric field strength in any other complicated electrode system of EP.