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 electr ostatic precipitators (ESP), a new computational scheme has been devel oped, where the involved physical phenomena such as corona-field, turb ulent electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow held, in situ particle charging a nd turbulent motion of particles are treated simultaneously To overcom e the deficiencies of the Eulerian method used up to now, a Lagrangian particle-tracking method coupled with the Monte-Carlo method for simu lating the stochastic nature of turbulence is used. The scheme is appl ied to the analysis of an experimental wire-plate ESP of short length (Kihm, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, 1987), where the e ffect of developing flow in the entrance region is substantial. The si mulation results for two different flow conditions of high and low tur bulent intensity at the inlet clearly reproduced the steeper increase of efficiency with voltage for low turbulence case observed in the exp eriment, and also the efficiency values agree very well with the exper imental data for one particle size of 4 mu m. (C) 1997 Elsevier Scienc e Ltd.