High-temperature electrostatic precipitation is a potentially convenient method for hot gas clean-up. This paper reports the characteristics of electrostatic precipitation in a wire-cylinder configuration for a temperature range of 350 degrees C to 700 degrees C. Three parameters, i.e., particle collection efficiency, energy consumption index and the outlet mass concentration of particles, are investigated to evaluate the comprehensive performance of an electrostatic precipitator at high temperatures and to propose a method to choose an optimum combination of the operation parameters for different conditions. The collection efficiency can be greater than 0.996 when the gas temperature is 350-700 degrees C and the inlet mass concentration of paiticles is 200-3600 mg/Nm(3). When the voltage applied to the two electrodes is high enough (greater than 15,900 V in this work), the collection efficiency is hardly influenced by the inlet mass concentrations of particles in the testing range. For example, at 620 degrees C when the applied voltage is 15,925 V, the fluctuations of the collection efficiency are within similar to 02% even if the inlet mass concentration increases similar to 10 times. For a given inlet mass concentration of particles, the collection efficiency increases rapidly as the applied voltage increases from the first stage to the second stage, while the collection efficiency increases slowly as the applied voltage increases from the second stage to the third stage. The relationship between the energy consumption index, the applied voltage and the inlet mass concentration of particles is given by phi = CUP2(U-p - U-c)/m(in). As the temperature increases from 350 degrees C to 700 degrees C, the value of C increases from 1.0 x 10(-5) to 3.2 x 10(-5) and the value of U-c decreases from 20,860 to 12,503. The electric energy consumed by an electrostatic precipitator increases rapidly with the increase in the temperature. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.