EHD flow in air produced by electric corona discharge in pin-plate configuration

The electrohydrodynamic flow in air produced by the electric corona discharge in the pin-plate and pin-grid configurations has been investigated numerically and experimentally in this paper. The numerical algorithm based on the boundary and finite element methods and the method of characteristics is employed to obtain the distributions of the electric field, the electric potential and the space charge density. After the volume force has been calculated, the commercial FLUENT software is used to solve the airflow. Experimental axial velocity profiles outside the ground grid obtained with a hot-wire anemometer reasonably validate the simulation results. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.