Modeling of a two stages electrostatic air precipitation process using response surface modeling

Any industrial process needs to work with the optimal operating conditions and thus the evaluation of their robustness is a critical issue. A modeling of a laboratoryscale wire-to-plane two stages electrostatic precipitator for guiding the identification of the set point, is presented this in paper. The procedure consists of formulating recommendations regarding the choice of optimal values for electrostatic precipitation. A twostages laboratory precipitator was used to carry out the experiments, with samples of wood particles of average granulometric size 10 μm. The parameters considered in the present study are the negative applied high voltage of the ionization stage, the positive voltage of the collection stage and the air speed. First, three “one-factor-at-a-time” experiments were performed followed by a factorial composite design experiments, based on a two-step strategy: 1) identify the domain of variation of the variables; 2) set point identification and optimization of the process.