Modulation of the wall-heat transfer in turbulent thermomagnetic convection by magnetic field gradients

We present combined experimental and numerical studies of the heat transfer of paramagnetic or diamagnetic fluid inside a differentially heated cubical enclosure subjected to the magnetic field gradients of different strength and orientation. In contrast to the previously reported studies in literature, which observed solely laminar flow regimes, here we focused on the fully developed turbulent flow regimes. That was possible by using a combination of the state-of-art superconducting magnets (with a strength up to 10 T and magnetic field gradients up to 900 T2/m) and by selecting various paramagnetic or diamagnetic working fluids (in a range of 10 Pr 1000). Detailed comparison between experiments (integral wall-heat transfer, temperature time-series at different locations within the enclosure) and direct numerical simulations (DNS) are performed and generally very good agreements are obtained in predicting the integral heat transfer. In addition, analysis of the long-term averaged first- and second-moments of velocity and thermal fields is performed. Finally, budgets of the turbulent kinetic energy and of the temperature variance are analyzed and the mean mechanism of the thermal plume reorganization in terms of the proper-orthogonal decomposition (POD) modes is presented.Chemical EngineeringApplied Science