The stability of shear flows of electrically conducting fluids, with respect to finite amplitude three-dimensional localized disturbances is considered. The time evolution of the fluid impulse integral, characterizing such disturbances, for the case of low magnetic Reynolds number is obtained by integrating analytically the vorticity equation. Analysis of the resulted equation reveals a new instability criterion.
We investigate the fully developed flow between two parallel plates and the film flow over a plate in an electrically conducting fluid under the action of a parallel Lorentz force. Exact analytical solutions are derived for velocity, flow rate and wall shear stress at the plates. The velocity results are presented in figures. All these flows are new and are presented for the first time in the literature.
We investigate inviscid instability in an electrically conducting fluid affected by a parallel magnetic field. The case of low magnetic Reynolds number in Poiseuille flow is considered. When the magnetic field is sufficiently strong, for a flow with low hydrodynamic Reynolds number, it is already known that the neutral disturbances are three-dimensional. Our investigation shows that at high hydrodynamic Reynolds number(inviscid flow), the effect of the strength of the magnetic field on the fastest growing perturbations is limited to a decrease of their oblique angle i.e. angle between the dire…
We report an analytical investigation of the force and torque acting upon a magnetic dipole placed in the vicinity of a moving electrically conducting nonmagnetic plate. This problem is relevant to contactless electromagnetic flow measurement in metallurgy and extends previous theoretical works (Thess et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 96(2006), 164501; New J. Phys. 9(2007), 299) to the case where the orientation of the magnetic dipole relative to the plate is arbitrary. It is demonstrated that for the case of low magnetic Reynolds number the three-dimensional distributions of the induced electric potent…
The study investigates the problem of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) free convection over a non-isothermal axisymmetric body under the action of transverse magnetic field. The body is embedded in a porous medium saturated with electrically conducting non-Newtonian power law fluid. In order to obtain similarity solution, it is assumed that the viscosity of the fluid decays exponentially with temperature. The qualitative results are illustrated for a vertical flat plate, horizontal cylinder and sphere.
Liquid metal ion sources (LMIS) are widely used in applications ranging from local ion implantation in semiconductors, to focused ion beam systems for milling and nanolithography, to space micropropulsion devices being developed by NASA. Above a critically large field strength, an electrically stressed liquid metal develops one or more cuspidal protrusions which undergo accelerated conic tip sharpening with runaway field self-enhancement. Zubarev (2001) first predicted from an inviscid model that the electric stresses at the liquid apex undergo self-similar divergent growth in finite time. The…
We introduce six families of three-dimensional space-periodic steady solenoidal flows, whose kinetic helicity density is zero at any point. Four families are analytically defined. Flows in four families have zero helicity spectrum. Sample flows from five families are used to demonstrate numerically that neither zero kinetic helicity density, nor zero helicity spectrum prohibit generation of large-scale magnetic field by the two most prominent dynamo mechanisms: the magnetic $α$-effect and negative eddy diffusivity. Our computations also attest that such flows often generate small-scale field f…
In this work, we study the implementation of electrically-driven flow (EDF) models in the finite-volume framework of $\text{OpenFOAM}^\circledR$. The Poisson-Nernst-Planck model is used for the transport of charged species and it is coupled to the Navier-Stokes equations, governing the fluid flow. In addition, the Poisson-Boltzmann and Debye-Hückel models are also implemented. The discretization method and the boundary conditions are carefully handled in order to ensure conservativeness of ionic species in generic meshes and second-order accuracy in space and time. The applicability of the dev…
We consider a Taylor-Dean-type flow of an electrically conducting liquid in an annulus between two infinitely long perfectly conducting cylinders subject to a generally helical magnetic field. The cylinders are electrically connected through a remote, perfectly conducting endcap, which allows a radial electric current to pass through the liquid. The radial current interacting with the axial component of magnetic field gives rise to the azimuthal electromagnetic force, which destabilizes the base flow by making its angular momentum decrease radially outwards. This instability, which we refer to…
The exhaustive classification of stationary incompressible flows with constant total pressure of ideal infinitely electrically conducting fluid is given. By introduction of curvilinear coordinates based on streamlines and magnetic lines of the flow the system of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations is reduced to a nonlinear vector wave equation extended by the incompressibility condition in a form of a generalized Cauchy integral. For flows with constant total pressure the wave equation is explicitly integrated, whereas the incompressibility condition is reduced to a scalar equation for functi…
Near-critical behavior of the free surface of an ideally conducting liquid in an external electric field is considered. Based on an analysis of three-wave processes using the method of integral estimations, sufficient criteria for hard instability of a planar surface are formulated. It is shown that the higher-order nonlinearities do not saturate the instability, for which reason the growth of disturbances has an explosive character.
We investigate numerically magnetic field generation by thermal convection with square periodicity cells in a rotating horizontal layer of electrically-conducting fluid with stress-free electrically perfectly conducting boundaries for Rayleigh numbers in the interval 5100\le R\le 5800. Dynamos of three kinds, apparently not encountered before, are presented: 1) Steady and time-periodic regimes, where the flow and magnetic field are symmetric about a vertical axis. In regimes with this symmetry, the global alpha-effect is insignificant, and the complex structure of the system of amplitude equat…
This study presents numerical simulations and experiments considering the flow of an electrically conducting fluid inside a cube driven by a rotating magnetic field (RMF). The investigations are focused on the spin-up, where a liquid metal (GaInSn) is suddenly exposed to an azimuthal body force generated by the RMF, and the subsequent flow development. The numerical simulations rely on a semi-analytical expression for the induced electromagnetic force density in an electrically conducting medium inside a cuboid container with insulating walls. Velocity distributions in two perpendicular planes…
The mean electromotive force caused by turbulence of an electrically conducting fluid, which plays a central part in mean--field electrodynamics, is calculated for a rotating fluid. Going beyond most of the investigations on this topic, an additional mean motion in the rotating frame is taken into account. One motivation for our investigation originates from a planned laboratory experiment with a Ponomarenko-like dynamo. In view of this application the second--order correlation approximation is used. The investigation is of high interest in astrophysical context, too. Some contributions to the…
The research is devoted to the stability of convective flow in a nonuniformly rotating layer of an electrically conducting fluid in a spiral magnetic field. The stationary and oscillatory modes of magnetic convection are considered depending on the profile of the angular rotation velocity (Rossby number $\textrm{Ro}$) and on the profile of the external azimuthal magnetic field (magnetic Rossby number $\textrm{Rb}$). The nonlinear dynamic system of Lorentz type equations is obtained by using the Galerkin method. Numerical analysis of these equations has shown the presence of chaotic behavior of…
In this paper, the generation of magnetic fields in a nonuniformly rotating layer of finite thickness of an electrically conducting fluid by thermomagnetic (TM) instability. This instability arises due to the temperature gradient $\nabla T_0$ and thermoelectromotive coefficient gradient $\nablaα$. The influence of the generation of a toroidal magnetic field by TM instability on convective instability in a nonuniformly rotating layer of an electrically conductive fluid in the presence of a vertical constant magnetic field ${\bf{B}}_0 \| {\rm OZ}$ is established. As a result of applying the meth…
This study is concerned with numerical linear stability analysis of liquid metal flow in a square duct with thin electrically conducting walls subject to a uniform transverse magnetic field. We derive an asymptotic solution for the base flow which is valid not only for high but also moderate magnetic fields. This solution shows that for low wall conductance ratios $c\ll1,$ an extremely strong magnetic field with the Hartmann number $Ha\sim c^{-4}$ is required to attain the asymptotic flow regime considered in the previous studies. We use a vector stream function/vorticity formulation and a Che…
Thermal convection in an electrically conducting fluid (for example, a liquid metal) in the presence of a static magnetic field is considered in this chapter. The focus is on the extreme states of the flow, in which both buoyancy and Lorentz forces are very strong. It is argued that the instabilities occurring in such flows are often of unique and counter-intuitive nature due to the action of the magnetic field, which suppresses conventional turbulence and gives preference to two-dimensional instability modes not appearing in more conventional convection systems. Tools of numerical analysis su…
In the above paper the author treats the boundary layer flow of an electrically conducting, non-Newtonian fluid along a vertical plate embedded in a Darcy-Brinkman-Forchheimer porous medium. The fluid is under the action of a constant transverse magnetic field and the radiation is taken into account in the energy equation. The boundary layer equations are transformed into ordinary ones and subsequently are solved numerically. However, there is a fundamental error in this paper which is presented below:
Eddy current flow meters (ECFM) are widely used for measuring the flow velocity of electrically conducting fluids. Since the flow induced perturbations of a magnetic field depend both on the geometry and the conductivity of the fluid, extensive calibration is needed to get accurate results. Transient eddy current flow metering (TECFM) has been developed to overcome this problem. It relies on tracking the position of an impressed eddy current system which is moving with the same velocity as the conductive fluid. We present an immersed version of this measurement technique and demonstrate its vi…
We analyse numerically the linear stability of a liquid metal flow in a rectangular duct with perfectly electrically conducting walls subject to a uniform transverse magnetic field. A non-standard three dimensional vector stream function/vorticity formulation is used with Chebyshev collocation method to solve the eigenvalue problem for small-amplitude perturbations. A relatively weak magnetic field is found to render the flow linearly unstable as two weak jets appear close to the centre of the duct at the Hartmann number Ha \approx 9.6. In a sufficiently strong magnetic field, the instability …
We consider the onset of Boussinesq convection in a horizontal layer of electrically conducting incompressible fluid with rigid electrically insulating horizontal boundaries. The fluid is heated from below and rotates about a vertical axis; vertical magnetic field is imposed. The instability of the trivial steady state (fluid at rest) can be monotonic or oscillatory depending on parameters of the problem (the kinematic and magnetic Prandtl, Taylor and Chandrasekhar numbers). If the Taylor number is sufficiently large, convective rolls, emerging in the monotonic instability, experience the Küpp…
We consider the induction of magnetic field in flows of electrically conducting fluid at low magnetic Prandtl number and large kinetic Reynolds number. Using the separation between the magnetic and kinetic diffusive lengthscales, we propose a new numerical approach. The coupled magnetic and fluid equations are solved using a mixed scheme, where the magnetic field fluctuations are fully resolved and the velocity fluctuations at small scale are modelled using a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) scheme. We study the response of a forced Taylor-Green flow to an externally applied field: tology of the me…
We analyse numerically the linear stability of the fully developed liquid metal flow in a square duct with insulating side walls and thin electrically conducting horizontal walls with the wall conductance ratio $c=0.01\cdots 1$ subject to a vertical magnetic field with the Hartmann numbers up to $Ha=10^{4}.$ In a sufficiently strong magnetic field, the flow consists of two jets at the side walls walls and a near-stagnant core with the relative velocity $\sim(cHa)^{-1}.$ We find that for $Ha\gtrsim300,$ the effect of wall conductivity on the stability of the flow is mainly determined by the eff…
In this work we extend our previously developed formalism of Newtonian multi-fluid hydrodynamics to allow for coupling between the fluids and the electromagnetic and gravitational field. This is achieved within the convective variational principle by using a standard minimal coupling prescription. In addition to the conservation of total energy and momentum, we derive the conservation of canonical vorticity and helicity, which generalize the corresponding conserved quantities of uncharged fluids. We discuss the application of this formalism to electrically conducting systems, magnetohydrodynam…
We investigate numerically kinematic dynamos driven by flow of electrically conducting fluid in the shell between two concentric differentially rotating spheres, a configuration normally referred to as spherical Couette flow. We compare between axisymmetric (2D) and fully three dimensional flows, between low and high global rotation rates, between prograde and retrograde differential rotations, between weak and strong nonlinear inertial forces, between insulating and conducting boundaries, and between two aspect ratios. The main results are as follows. Azimuthally drifting Rossby waves arising…
We investigate the linear stability of a thin, suspended, annular film of conducting fluid with a voltage difference applied between its inner and outer edges. For a sufficiently large voltage, such a film is unstable to radially-driven electroconvection due to charges which develop on its free surfaces. The film can also be subjected to a Couette shear by rotating its inner edge. This combination is experimentally realized using films of smectic A liquid crystals. In the absence of shear, the convective flow consists of a stationary, azimuthally one-dimensional pattern of symmetric, counter-r…
We study numerically the dynamo transition of an incompressible electrically conducting fluid filling the gap between two concentric spheres. In a first series of simulations, the fluid is driven by the rotation of a smooth inner sphere through no-slip boundary conditions, whereas the outer sphere is stationary. In a second series a volume force intended to simulate a rough surface drives the fluid next to the inner sphere within a layer of thickness one tenth of the gap width. We investigate the effect of the boundary layer thickness on the dynamo threshold in the turbulent regime. The simula…
We analyse numerically the linear stability of the fully developed flow of a liquid metal in a rectangular duct subject to a transverse magnetic field. The walls of the duct perpendicular to the magnetic field are perfectly conducting whereas the parallel ones are insulating. In a sufficiently strong magnetic field, the flow consists of two jets at the insulating walls and a near-stagnant core. We use a vector stream function formulation and Chebyshev collocation method to solve the eigenvalue problem for small-amplitude perturbations. Due to the two-fold reflection symmetry of the base flow t…
Using the WKB approximation we perform a linear stability analysis for a rotational flow of a viscous and electrically conducting fluid in an external azimuthal magnetic field that has an arbitrary radial profile B_{phi}(R). In the inductionless approximation, we find the growth rate of the three-dimensional perturbation in a closed form and demonstrate in particular that it can be positive when the velocity profile is Keplerian and the magnetic field profile is slightly shallower than R^{-1}.
