An efficient finite volume method for electric field-space charge coupled problems

The goal of this paper is to introduce some recently developed finite volume schemes to enable numerical simulation of electric field-space charge coupled problems. The key features of this methodology are the possibility of handling problems with complex geometries and accurately capturing the charge density distribution. The total variation diminishing (TVD) scheme and the improved deferred correction (IDC) scheme are used to compute the convective and diffusive fluxes respectively. Our technique is firstly verified with the computation of hydrostatic solutions in a two coaxial cylinders configuration. The homogeneous and autonomous injection from the inner or outer electrode is considered. Comparison has been made with the analytical solution. The numerical technique is also applied to the problem of corona discharge in a blade-plane configuration. The good agreement between our numerical solution and the one obtained with a combination approach of Finite Element Method (FEM) and Method of Characteristics (MoC) is shown. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.