Numerical Simulation of electrohydrodynamic flow produced by wire-to-cylinder in atmospheric condition

Applying an Electric potential between two electrodes with different thicknesses will cause corona discharge if the electric field around the corona electrode is strong enough to ionize the surrounding gas and weak enough to avoid arcing. Corona discharge used to be known as an unpleasant phenomenon but it has lots of applications today including the ionic thrusters. In this research, the specifications of the flow resulted from corona discharge such as velocity, thrust, and temperature, electric current, flow streamlines and thrust effectiveness have been numerically studied. To do so, the electrostatic and Navier-Stokes equations have been coupled and solved by finite element method (FEM) using the COMSOL Multiphysics software version 5.2.Data validation shows that the maximum errors between the numerical and experimental results in computing thrust, current and thrust effectiveness are respectively below 2%, 14% and 6%. Also the results show that with rising the applied Voltage, the resulted thrust and electric current will increase and the thrust effectiveness decreases. Furthermore, by considering the effect of Ohmic heating in the energy equation, it has been found that the maximum temperature raise happens around anode.