Computational study of glow corona discharge in wind: Biased conductor

Corona discharges in flowing gas are of technological significance for a wide range of applications, ranging from plasma reactors to lightning protection systems. Numerous experimental studies of corona discharges in wind have confirmed the strong influence of wind on the corona current. Many of these studies report global electrical characteristics of the gaseous discharge but do not present details of the spatial structure of the potential field and charge distribution. Numerical simulation can help clarify the role of wind on the ion redistribution and the electric field shielding. In this work, we propose a methodology to solve numerically for the drift region of a DC glow corona using the usual approach of collapsing the ionization region to the electrode surface, but allowing for strong inhomogeneities in the electrical and flow setup. Numerical results for a grounded wire in the presence of an ambient electric field and wind are presented. The model predicts that the effect of the wind is to reduce the extension of the corona over the wire and to shift the center of the ion distribution upstream of the flow. In addition, we find that, even though the near-surface ion distribution is strongly affected by the ion injection law used, the current characteristics and the far field solution remain pretty much unaffected.