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Full-Text Articles in Physics

Hydrodynamic And Magnetohydrodynamic Computations Inside A Rotating Sphere, P. D. Mininni, D. C. Montgomery, L. Turner Aug 2007

Hydrodynamic And Magnetohydrodynamic Computations Inside A Rotating Sphere, P. D. Mininni, D. C. Montgomery, L. Turner

Dartmouth Scholarship

Numerical solutions of the incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations are reported for the interior of a rotating, perfectly-conducting, rigid spherical shell that is insulator-coated on the inside. A previously-reported spectral method is used which relies on a Galerkin expansion in Chandrasekhar–Kendall vector eigenfunctions of the curl. The new ingredient in this set of computations is the rigid rotation of the sphere. After a few purely hydrodynamic examples are sampled (spin down, Ekman pumping, inertial waves), attention is focused on selective decay and the MHD dynamo problem. In dynamo runs, prescribed mechanical forcing excites a persistent velocity field, usually turbulent at modest …


Low Magnetic Prandtl Number Dynamos With Helical Forcing, Pablo D. Mininni, David C. Montgomery Nov 2005

Low Magnetic Prandtl Number Dynamos With Helical Forcing, Pablo D. Mininni, David C. Montgomery

Dartmouth Scholarship

We present direct numerical simulations of dynamo action in a forced Roberts flow. The behavior of the dynamo is followed as the mechanical Reynolds number is increased, starting from the laminar case until a turbulent regime is reached. The critical magnetic Reynolds for dynamo action is found, and in the turbulent flow it is observed to be nearly independent on the magnetic Prandtl number in the range from ∼0.3 to ∼0.1. Also the dependence of this threshold with the amount of mechanical helicity in the flow is studied. For the different regimes found, the configuration of the magnetic and velocity …


The Temporally Filtered Navier-Stokes Equations: Propertes Of The Residual Stress, C. D. Pruett, T. B. Gatski, Chester E. Grosch, W. D. Thacker Jan 2003

The Temporally Filtered Navier-Stokes Equations: Propertes Of The Residual Stress, C. D. Pruett, T. B. Gatski, Chester E. Grosch, W. D. Thacker

CCPO Publications

Recent interest in the development of a unifying framework among direct numerical simulations, large-eddy simulations, and statistically averaged formulations of the Navier-Stokes equations, provides the motivation for the present paper. Toward that goal, the properties of the residual (subgrid-scale) stress of the temporally filtered Navier-Stokes equations are carefully examined. This includes the frame-invariance properties of the filtered equations and the resulting residual stress. Causal time-domain filters, parametrized by a temporal filter width 0infinity, the residual stress is equivalent to the long-time averaged stress, and the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations are recovered from the temporally filtered equations. The predicted behavior at the …


Velocity Field Distributions Due To Ideal Line Vortices, Thomas D. Levi, David C. Montgomery Apr 2001

Velocity Field Distributions Due To Ideal Line Vortices, Thomas D. Levi, David C. Montgomery

Dartmouth Scholarship

We evaluate numerically the velocity field distributions produced by a bounded, two-dimensional fluid model consisting of a collection of parallel ideal line vortices. We sample at many spatial points inside a rigid circular boundary. We focus on “nearest-neighbor” contributions that result from vortices that fall (randomly) very close to the spatial points where the velocity is being sampled. We confirm that these events lead to a non-Gaussian high-velocity “tail” on an otherwise Gaussian distribution function for the Eulerian velocity field. We also investigate the behavior of distributions that do not have equilibrium mean-field probability distributions that are uniform inside the …