Steady-state corona charging behavior of a corotron over a moving dielectric substrate

Charging up a dielectric surface through corona discharge from a thin wire has been a common practice in electrophotographic processes. One of the widely used corona charging devices is called a corotron, which consists of a coronating wire enclosed in a rectangular shield with one constituent side being the surface to be charged. Uniform surface charge can be deposited on a dielectric substrate, such as a photoreceptor in the absence of light, by moving the substrate at a constant velocity through a stationary corotron that consistently emits corona current. To design an efficient corotron for charging dielectric substrates, a fundamental understanding of the electrostatic nature of the device is desired. In this paper, the steady-state behavior of corona charging with a corotron over a moving dielectric substrate is analyzed by computationally solving the nonlinearly coupled equation system with Galerkin finite-element method and Newton iterations. The predictions based on a first-principle model are shown to agree well with experimental measurements.