Buoyant flow in long vertical enclosures in the presence of a strong horizontal magnetic field. Part 2. Finite enclosures

Numerical computations and experiments were carried out for a buoyant flow of liquid metal (mercury in the experiments) in a long vertical enclosure of square cross-section, in the presence of a uniform horizontal magnetic field. A strong emphasis is put on the case of a magnetic field perpendicular to the applied temperature gradient for two reasons: (1) the MHD damping is smaller than with any other orientation, and (2) the quasi-two-dimensionality of the flow in this case yields a quite efficient velocity measurement technique. The enclosure is heated by a thermally controlled flow of water from one of the vertical walls and cooled by a similar technique from the facing wall. Those two walls are good thermal conductors (thick copper plates in the experiments), whereas the four other walls are thermally insulating. All walls are electrically insulated from the fluid. In this paper, as well as in the companion paper by Tagawa et al. (Eur. J. Mech. B Fluids 21 (4) (2002) 383–398), we model analytically the Hartmann layers present along the walls perpendicular to the magnetic field. This modeling, which yields boundary conditions for the core flow without any meshing of the thin layers, is quite accurate when Hartmann layers are stable. The numerical results are in fairly good agreement with the experimental data. They namely reveal how the heat flux and the fluid flow organization depend on the magnetic field.