Effect of an Applied Magnetic Field on Joule Heating-Induced Thermal Convection

Abstract

Thermal convection induced by internal heating appears in different natural situations and technological applications with different internal sources of heat (e.g., radiation, electric or magnetic fields, chemical reactions). Thermal convection due to Joule heating in weak electrical conducting liquids such as molten salts with symmetric thermal boundary conditions is investigated using linear stability analysis. We show that, in the quasi-static approximation where the induced magnetic field is negligible, the effect of the external magnetic field consists of the delay in the threshold of thermal convection and the increase in the size of thermoconvective rolls for an intense magnetic field. Analysis of the budget of the perturbations’ kinetic energy reveals that the Lorentz force contributes to the dissipation of the kinetic energy.

Keywords

• thermal convection
• Joule heating
• Chebyshev polynomials
• collocation method
• Lorentz force