A novel simulation method for positive corona current pulses**Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB209402), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51177041), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (Grant No. 12QX01).

Abstract

A novel two-dimensional (2D) simulation method of positive corona current pulses is proposed. A control-volume-based finite element method (CV-FEM) is used to solve continuity equations, and the Galerkin finite element method (FEM) is used to solve Poisson’s equation. In the proposed method, photoionization is considered by adopting an exact Helmholtz photoionization model. Furthermore, fully implicit discretization and variable time step are used to ensure the time-efficiency of the present method. Finally, the method is applied to a positive rod-plane corona problem. The numerical results are in agreement with the experimental results, and the validity of the proposed method is verified.