Corona Discharge Simulation of Multiconductor Electrostatic Precipitators

This paper considers corona discharge problems with multiple conductors, such as those appearing in some electrostatic precipitators. A common precise condition is identified in which the previous approaches proposed in the literature fail. For dealing with these conditions, a novel, stabilized, and regularized formulation of the problem is proposed. Moreover, a Newton-Raphson scheme is defined for iteratively solving a nonstandard Petrov-Galerkin finite-element discretization of the problem. The presented approach is validated on a benchmark for which an analytical solution is known and its applicability to problems of industrial relevance is shown.