Steady plane-parallel flow of a magnetic fluid

Abstract

In the hydrodynamics of a Newtonian fluid, nonlinear effects are connected only with the presence of convective derivatives in the equations and therefore disappear when plane-parallel flows are considered. Non-Newtonian effects are usually taken into account either phenomenologically in the expression for the stress tensor or by explicitly considering additional degrees of freedom. A theory of the effective viscosity of a magnetic fluid is constructed in [1] by regarding a magnetic fluid as a medium with internal rotation. It was shown that the flow of fluid in a magnetic field is non-Newtonian. Later, many authors (see, for example, [2, 3]) studied one- and two-dimensional flows under the influence of a pressure difference. However, the study was usually limited to continuous and smooth solutions. In the present work, we study the plane-parallel flow of a magnetic fluid in a homogeneous magnetic field under the influence of a longitudinal pressure gradient. We also consider discontinuous solutions. It is shown that for large longitudinal pressure gradients and sufficiently great intensities of the magnetic field, the problem has an infinite number of steady solutions which differ in the number and position of discontinuities of the magnetization and the associated abrupt changes in the velocity profile. Steady regimes and their stability are studied numerically with allowance for weak diffusion of magnetization and internal angular momentum. It is shown that the degeneracy is then lifted; however, in a certain region of parameters several stable steady regimes still exist.