Abstract
The mechanism of poloidal flow suppression in an electrovortex flow (EVF) is verified in a liquid metal experiment and supported by numerical simulations. Beyond a certain threshold of azimuthal forcing, a strong poloidal EVF flow develops only transiently, before the centrifugal forces of the slowly generated swirl compensate the EVF-driving forces. This result shows that EVFs can become of particular importance in large-scale liquid metal batteries, especially during the switch-on regime when the transient poloidal flows can be up to two orders of magnitude stronger than those expected in the saturated regime.
2 More- Received 1 July 2020
- Accepted 7 December 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.5.123703
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