A CRITICAL REVIEW OF MODELS USED IN NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF ELECTROSTATIC PRECIPITATORS

Abstract

The electrostatic precipitators (ESP) have been drawing more and more attention due to their high efficiency and low costs. Numerical simulation is a powerful, economical and flexible tool to design ESP for industry applications. This review summarizes the available numerical models to simulate different physical processes in ESP, including ionized electric field, air flow, particle charging and motion. It has been confirmed that the available models could provide acceptable results and the computing requirements are affordable in industry applications. The coupling between different physical processes can also be considered in simulation. However, there are still some problems not solved, such as selection of a suitable turbulence model in EHD simulation and the coupling criteria. The future study should focus on these issues. This review also includes new types of ESP developed in recent years, such as dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) ESP and corona assisted fibrous filter. These new types of ESP have had high efficiency and low energy consumption. Even though nearly all new ESP types can be modeled using the available numerical models, the most challenging issue is the DBD simulation.

Keywords

• particle precipitation
• numerical simulation
• corona discharge
• DBD discharge