Electrostatic precipitation (ESP) is a technology widely used to remove particulate matter (PM) from industrial gas streams. To adopt the same for varying scales as well as for different clean air delivery applications as in indoor and outdoor air pollution, there exists a requirement for the development of comprehensive, readily adaptable, reasonably good, comparable, rigorous, step-by-step analytical theory and experimental validation of same for design of modular units of ESP. In this regard, the current study conducted theoretical and experimental studies to investigate corona characterization and PM collection efficiency in a modular unit of a single-wire, single-stage, wire-plate ESP with square cross-sectional geometry. The best agreement between the I-V characteristics of theory and the experiment was obtained while adjusting the inception electric field to 12.35 × 10