Applications of upwind and downwind schemes for calculating electrical conditions in a wire–plate electrostatic precipitator

The traditional finite difference method has been widely used to calculate two-dimensional electrical conditions in the wire–plate electrostatic precipitation and the calculation domain has to be confined in the first quadrant of single discharge electrode on the base of the symmetry assumption. In order to remove the symmetry assumption, an unconditional convergent numerical method, in which the upwind (or downwind) scheme was used for the positive (or negative) corona, is presented to calculate the three-dimensional distributions of the electric potential and the space charge in a wire–plate electrostatic precipitator. And the predicted electric potentials agree well with existing experimental data.