No Arabic abstract
The presence of chaotic transients in a nonlinear dynamo is investigated through numerical simulations of the 3D magnetohydrodynamic equations. By using the kinetic helicity of the flow as a control parameter, a hysteretic blowout bifurcation is conjectured to be responsible for the transition to dynamo, leading to a sudden increase in the magnetic energy of the attractor. This high-energy hydromagnetic attractor is suddenly destroyed in a boundary crisis when the helicity is decreased. Both the blowout bifurcation and the boundary crisis generate long chaotic transients that are due, respectively, to a chaotic saddle and a relative chaotic attractor.
Much work on turbulent three-dimensional dynamos has been done using triply periodic domains, in which there are no magnetic helicity fluxes. Here we present simulations where the turbulent intensity is still nearly homogeneous, but now there is a perfect conductor boundary condition on one end and a vertical field or pseudo-vacuum condition on the other. This leads to migratory dynamo waves. Good agreement with a corresponding analytically solvable alpha^2 dynamo is found. Magnetic helicity fluxes are studied in both types of models. It is found that at moderate magnetic Reynolds numbers, most of the magnetic helicity losses occur at large scales. Whether this changes at even larger magnetic Reynolds numbers, as required for alleviating the catastrophic dynamo quenching problem, remains still unclear.
The role of turbulence in current generation and self-excitation of magnetic fields has been studied in the geometry of a mechanically driven, spherical dynamo experiment, using a three dimensional numerical computation. A simple impeller model drives a flow which can generate a growing magnetic field, depending upon the magnetic Reynolds number, Rm, and the fluid Reynolds number. When the flow is laminar, the dynamo transition is governed by a simple threshold in Rm, above which a growing magnetic eigenmode is observed. The eigenmode is primarily a dipole field tranverse to axis of symmetry of the flow. In saturation the Lorentz force slows the flow such that the magnetic eigenmode becomes marginally stable. For turbulent flow, the dynamo eigenmode is suppressed. The mechanism of suppression is due to a combination of a time varying large-scale field and the presence of fluctuation driven currents which effectively enhance the magnetic diffusivity. For higher Rm a dynamo reappears, however the structure of the magnetic field is often different from the laminar dynamo; it is dominated by a dipolar magnetic field which is aligned with the axis of symmetry of the mean-flow, apparently generated by fluctuation-driven currents. The fluctuation-driven currents have been studied by applying a weak magnetic field to laminar and turbulent flows. The magnetic fields generated by the fluctuations are significant: a dipole moment aligned with the symmetry axis of the mean-flow is generated similar to those observed in the experiment, and both toroidal and poloidal flux expulsion are observed.
The two-fluid (ions and electrons) plasma Richtmyer-Meshkov instability of a cylindrical light/heavy density interface is numerically investigated without an initial magnetic field. Varying the Debye length scale, we examine the effects of the coupling between the electron and ion fluids. When the coupling becomes strong, the electrons are restricted to co-move with the ions and the resulting evolution is similar to the hydrodynamic neutral fluid case. The charge separation that occurs between the electrons and ions results in self-generated electromagnetic fields. We show that the Biermann battery effect dominates the generation of magnetic field when the coupling between the electrons and ions is weak. In addition to the Rayleigh-Tayler stabilization effect during flow deceleration, the interfaces are accelerated by the induced spatio-temporally varying Lorentz force. As a consequence, the perturbations develop into the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, leading to an enhancement of the perturbation amplitude compared with the hydrodynamic case.
A two-field model of potential vorticity (PV) staircase structure and dynamics relevant to both beta-plane and drift-wave plasma turbulence is studied numerically and analytically. The model evolves averaged PV whose flux is both driven by and regulates, a potential enstrophy field, $varepsilon$. The model employs a closure using a mixing length model. Its link to bistability, vital to staircase generation, is analyzed and verified by integrating the equations numerically. Long-time staircase evolution consistently manifests a pattern of meta-stable quasi-periodic configurations, lasting for hundreds of time units, yet interspersed with abrupt ($Delta tll1$) mergers of adjacent steps in the staircase. The mergers occur at the staircase lattice defects where the pattern has not completely relaxed to a strictly periodic solution that can be obtained analytically. Other types of stationary solutions are solitons and kinks in the PV gradient and $varepsilon$ - profiles. The waiting time between mergers increases strongly as the number of steps in the staircase decreases. This is because of an exponential decrease in inter-step coupling strength with growing spacing. The long-time staircase dynamics is shown numerically be determined by local interaction with adjacent steps. Mergers reveal themselves through the explosive growth of the turbulent PV-flux which, however, abruptly drops to its global constant value once the merger is completed.
Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrust is produced when ionized fluid is accelerated in an electric field due to the momentum transfer between the charged species and neutral molecules. We extend the previously reported analytical model that couples space charge, electric field, and momentum transfer to derive thrust force in 1D planar coordinates. The electric current density in the model can be expressed in the form of Mott-Gurney law. After the correction for the drag force, the EHD thrust model yields good agreement with the experimental data from several independent studies. The EHD thrust expression derived from the first principles can be used in the design of propulsion systems and can be readily implemented in the numerical simulations.