Experimental measurement and numerical computation of velocity and turbulence parameters in a heated liquid metal system

Experimental measurements are reported describing the velocity field and the turbulence parameters in molten Woods metal due to the passage of a DC current between two electrodes immersed into the melt. The measurements were made using a hot film anemometer. A mathematical model has been developed to represent these measurements; in essence, this relied on the solution of Maxwell’s equations to represent the electromagnetic force field and turbulent Navier-Stokes equations to represent the fluid flow field. Three different turbulence models were examined; two were variants of thek-ε model, while the third was mixing length model type. In general, the velocities were well predicted by all three of these models, but there were significant discrepancies as far as the turbulence parameters were concerned. In the paper, a new criterion was suggested to predict the onset of turbulence in systems of this type.