A simple dipole approach for the calculation of electrostatic field and onset corona voltage in wires-to-cylinders electrode configurations

Abstract

This paper presents a semi-analytical approach for calculating the potential and electric field in a system of several equipotential groups of infinitely long parallel cylindrical conductors. The proposed method is a simplification of the successive dipole simulation method, presented earlier, taking into account the equality of potentials in each group of conductors with given potentials. This method was applied to calculate the electric field in the gap between W wires and W + 1 cylinders of a bipolar conductor system and used only W (W + 1) unknown dipole charges instead of W (2W + 1) in the original version of the successive dipole simulation method. The corona onset voltages were estimated in the conductor systems with W = 1 ÷ 33. The values of the electric field around the thin wires were accurate already in the first stage of the method. The estimations of the corona onset voltages for various discharge gaps were compared with the experimental values. The advantages of this formulation of the successive dipole simulation method are a simpler, clearer, and faster algorithm.