Charged and uncharged particle motions and collection characteristics around a bipolar charged rectangular shape electret fiber are studied numerically. Particle inertia, fluid drag, Coulomb force and polarization force are considered to predict the particle motion around the electret fiber. The effects of particle sizes, flow velocities, number of charges and polarities are also systematically investigated. For small size particles, the single fiber collection efficiency is greatly dependent on the charge polarity and the number of charges on a particle. However, particles larger than 5.mu.m do not show charging effect on collection efficiencies in the flow velocity ranges from 1.5 cm/s to 150 cm/s when the maximum charges are within +5 to -10. The results show that a strong electric field gradient at the corner of the bipolar charged fiber plays a very important role on collecting particles regardless of its charge polarity because of the polarization force. It also shows that the most penetrating particle size for a single electret fiber decreases as the flow velocity increases and the number of charges of a particle decreases.