Application of the local RBF collocation method to natural convection in a 3D cavity influenced by a magnetic field

Abstract

This paper explores, for the first time, the application of the novel mesh-free local radial basis function collocation method (LRBFCM) to the solution of a multi-physics problem in three dimensions. A related benchmark problem is solved by considering the natural convection of an incompressible Newtonian fluid in a differentially heated cubic cavity with and without the application of a magnetic field. The research is limited to typical magnetic fields used in the magnetohydrodynamic processing of liquid metals. For this purpose the assumption of small magnetic Reynolds numbers Rem ≪ 1 is made. Spatial discretization is performed by local non-uniform collocation with scaled multiquadrics radial basis functions (RBFs) with the shape parameter set to a constant value and the explicit Euler formula used to perform the time stepping. The involved temperature, velocity and pressure fields are represented on overlapping seven-nodded sub-domains. The pressure-velocity coupling is resolved by the fractional step method. The originality of the contribution represents LRBFCM solution of the classic three-dimensional steady natural convection benchmark for Rayleigh numbers from 105 to 107 and Prandtl number 0.71, and its extension to Prandtl number 0.1, and Hartman numbers 0, 10, 50 and 100. The accuracy of the LRBFCM is found to be comparable with the published benchmark results obtained using established numerical methods.