Magnetohydrodynamics

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Magnetohydrodynamics

MHD is involved in many industrial applications (melting, stirring, purification, casting) and rising technologies (liquid metal batteries, cooling of nuclear reactors)

One of our main specialities is MHD. Because numerical simulation tools for industrial MHD are rare,  unstable or slow, we have developed a tool EOF-Library that has become a standard for industrial MHD modeling. It is open-source code that couples OpenFOAM and Elmer FEM, and can be run on massively parallel computers.

Many metallurgical manufacturing applications, e.g., electromagnetic levitation melting or stirring, have turbulent flows. Typically, isotropic turbulence models like kEpsilon or kOmegaSST are implemented because of their lower computational costs, but averaging process inherently introduces dampening of perturbations and instabilities. The fine-scale flow details are lost and the flow that might appear steady-state in the simulation, will be transient and chaotic in experiments. To make simulation models real, one must, for instance, use the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method, which treats turbulence in a fully three-dimensional manner, even if they possess exploitable symmetries. The result is seen in the video above where levitating metal starts rotating around its central axis despite the setup being symmetrical against the vertical axis. Instabilities are highly undesirable in such large application like aluminium smelting.

Performance is key. Our simulation models are running on HPC systems with hundreds of cores.

Hartmann flow

Hartmann flow is classical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) problem in which conductive fluid is pushed through a pipe. Walls are electrically conductive or insulated, and the external magnetic field is applied perpendicularly to the flow direction.

We have templates for wide range or MHD applications. Large 3D models (more than 10M elements) can be solved in a reasonable time using fast iterative numerical methods.

SIA EOF Consulting ir noslēdzis 28.02.2020 līgumu Nr. VP-L-2020/12 ar Latvijas Investīciju un Attīstības Aģentūru par atbalsta saņemšanu vaučera programmas ietvaros. Pētījuma mērķis ir veikt eksperimentālo izstrādi, lai atrisinātu 3 industriālu problēmu modeļuzdevumus. EOF Consulting LLC signed contracts BIZIN-I-2019/731 and SKV-L-2019/115 with LIAA for recieving support from ERAF projects (3.1.1.6/16/I/001 and 3.2.1.2./16/I/001).

We received a grant from Olaine municipality as part of the Iedvesma competition: www.seb.lv/iedvesma