The use of flowing liquid metal streams or “liquid walls” as a plasma contact surface is a very attractive option and has received considerable attention over the past several years both in the plasma physics and fusion engineering programs. A key issue for the feasibility of flowing liquid metal plasma facing component (PFC) systems, lies in their magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) behavior. The spatia...

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) representations are used to model a wide range of plasma physics applications and are characterized by a nonlinear system of partial differential equations that strongly couples a charged fluid with the evolution of electromagnetic fields. The resulting linear systems that arise from discretization and linearization of the nonlinear problem are generally difficult to s...

Recent experiments using proton backlighting of laser-foil interactions provide unique opportunities for studying magnetized plasma instabilities in laser-produced high-energy-density plasmas. Time-gated proton radiograph images indicate that the outer structure of a magnetic field entrained in a hemispherical plasma bubble becomes distinctly asymmetric after the laser turns off. It is shown th...

This paper considers magnetic field generation by a fluid flow in a system referred to as the Archontis dynamo: a steady nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) state is driven by a prescribed body force. The field and flow become almost equal and dissipation is concentrated in cigar-like structures centred on straight-line separatrices. Numerical scaling laws for energy and dissipation are given t...

Numerical simulations of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) hypersonic flow over a cylinder are presented for axial- and transverse-oriented dipoles with different strengths. ANSYS CFX is used to carry out calculations for steady, laminar flows at a Mach number of 6.1, with a model for electrical conductivity as a function of temperature and pressure. The low magnetic Reynolds number (<<1) calculated ba...

In this work, a stabilized formulation to solve the inductionless magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) problem using the finite element (FE) method is presented. The MHD problem couples the Navier-Stokes and a Darcy-type problem for the electric potential via Lorentz’s force in the momentum equation of the Navier-Stokes equations and the currents generated by the moving fluid in Ohm’s law. The key feature...

I present results from magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of a gaseous envelope collapsing onto a black hole. These results support the notion that the collapsar model is one of most promising scenarios to explain the huge release of energy in a matter of seconds associated with Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB). Additionally, the MHD simulations show that at late times, when the mass supply rate is ex...

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models of plasma can be used to model many phenomena in the solar system. In this work we investigate the use of a general MHD solver the Flash code for the simulation of the interaction between the solar wind and solar system objects. As a test case we simulate the three-dimensional solar wind interaction with a simplified model of a comet and describe the modificatio...

Magnetic reconnection is a topological rearrangement of magnetic field that occurs on time scales much faster than the global magnetic diffusion time. Since the field lines break on microscopic scales but energy is stored and the field is driven on macroscopic scales, reconnection is an inherently multi-scale process that often involves both magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and kinetic phenomena. In t...

We briefly review recent developments in black hole accretion disk theory, emphasizing the vital role played by magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stresses in transporting angular momentum. The apparent universality of accretion-related outflow phenomena is a strong indicator that large-scale MHD torques facilitate vertical transport of angular momentum. This leads to an enhanced overall rate of angular...