English

The onset of turbulent rotating dynamos at the low $Pm$ limit

Fluid Dynamics 2017-06-28 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Geophysics

Abstract

We demonstrate that the critical magnetic Reynolds number RmcRm_c for a turbulent non-helical dynamo in the low magnetic Prandtl number PmPm limit (i.e. Pm=Rm/Re1Pm = Rm/Re \ll 1) can be significantly reduced if the flow is submitted to global rotation. Even for moderate rotation rates the required energy injection rate can be reduced by a factor more than 10310^3. This strong decrease of the onset is attributed to the reduction of the turbulent fluctuations that makes the flow to have a much larger cut-off length-scale compared to a non-rotating flow of the same Reynolds number. The dynamo thus behaves as if it is driven by laminar behaviour (i.e. high PmPm behaviour) even at high values of the Reynolds number (i.e. at low values of PmPm). Our finding thus points into a new paradigm for the design of new liquid metal dynamo experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.08996,
  title  = {The onset of turbulent rotating dynamos at the low $Pm$ limit},
  author = {Kannabiran Seshasayanan and Vassilios Dallas and Alexandros Alexakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.08996},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 6 figures