Stability of hydromagnetic Dean flow between two arbitrarily spaced concentric circular cylinders in the presence of a uniform axial magnetic field

Abstract

The effect of a uniform axial magnetic field on the stability of the flow of an incompressible viscous electrically conducting fluid between two arbitrarily spaced concentric circular cylinders driven by a constant azimuthal pressure gradient is studied. The linearized stability equations for steady axisymmetric disturbances form an eigenvalue problem, which are solved by using a classical Runge–Kutta scheme combined with a shooting method, termed unit disturbance method. It is observed that for fixed gap width, the magnetic field has a stabilizing influence on the flow for both perfectly conducting and nonconducting walls. It is also found that for a given value of magnetic parameter, stabilization is more as the gap width increases. Further the electrically nonconducting walls are found to be more destabilizing than the perfectly conducting walls. The critical value of the radii ratio ( 0 < η < 1 ) beyond which the first unstable mode becomes nonaxisymmetric is determined for various values of the magnetic parameter.