On Boundary Conditions for Lattice Kinetic Schemes for Magnetohydrodynamics Bounded by Walls with Finite Electrical Conductivities

TL;DR

This paper develops and validates two new lattice Boltzmann boundary schemes for magnetohydrodynamics that accurately incorporate finite wall conductivities via Shercliff boundary conditions, enhancing simulation fidelity for MHD flows with conductive walls.

Contribution

It introduces two novel boundary schemes for LB MHD simulations that implement Shercliff boundary conditions for finite wall conductivities, extending prior methods limited to perfect insulators.

Findings

The schemes accurately enforce Shercliff boundary conditions across a range of conductivities.

Numerical validations show second-order convergence and good agreement with analytical solutions.

The methods can handle moving walls and complex boundary conditions.

Abstract

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of liquid metals through conduits play an important role in the proposed systems for harnessing fusion energy, and various other engineering and scientific problems. The interplay between the magnetic fields and the fluid motion gives rise to complex flow physics, which depend on the electrical conductivity of the bounding walls. An effective approach to represent the latter is via the Shercliff boundary condition for thin conducting walls relating the induced magnetic field and its wall normal gradient at the boundary via a parameter referred to as the wall conductance ratio (Shercliff, JA, J. Fluid Mech. 1, 644 (1956)). Within the framework of the highly parallelizable lattice Boltzmann (LB) method, a lattice kinetic scheme for MHD involving a vector distribution function for the magnetic fields was proposed by Dellar (Dellar, PJ, J. Comp. Phys. 179, 95 (2002)). However, the prior LB algorithms only accounted for limiting special cases involving perfectly insulated boundaries and did not consider the finite conductivity effects. In this paper, we present two new boundary schemes that enforce the Shercliff boundary condition in the LB schemes for MHD. It allows for the specification of the wall conductance ratio to any desired value based on the actual conductivities and length scales of the container and the wall thicknesses. One approach is constructed using a link-based formulation involving a weighted combination of the bounce back and anti-bounce back of the distribution function for the magnetic field and the other approach involves an on-node moment-based implementation. Moreover, their extensions to representing moving walls are also presented. Numerical validations of the boundary schemes for body force or shear driven MHD flows for a wide range of the values of the wall conductance ratio and their second order grid convergence are demonstrated.