Direct simulation of multi-phase MHD flows on an unstructured Cartesian adaptive system

An approach for direct simulation of the multi-phase magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) flows has been developed in the present study on an unstructured Cartesian adaptive system. The approach is based on the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method for capturing the interface with the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique used to well resolve the interface and the boundary layer. The Lorentz force is calculated using the consistent and conservative scheme, which is specially designed on a Cartesian adaptive mesh to conserve the physical conservation laws. The continuous-surface-tension (CSF) formulation is adopted for surface tension calculation. Moreover, the interfacial flows driven by thermal Marangoni effects at multifluid interfaces are also studied with a special numerical treatment presented. The method is able to simulate bubble motion in liquid metal under magnetic field irrespective of high density ratio and electric conductivity ratio. The proposed scheme for multi-phase MHD flows is validated by experimental results as well as analytical solutions. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.