Stream function-velocity-magnetic induction compact difference method for the 2D steady incompressible full magnetohydrodynamic equations

Abstract

In this paper, an effective and accurate numerical model that involves a suggested mathematical formulation, viz., the stream functions (ψ and A)-velocity-magnetic induction formulation and a fourth-order compact difference algorithm is proposed for solving the two-dimensional (2D) steady incompressible full magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow equations. The stream functions-velocity-magnetic induction formulation of the 2D incompressible full MHD equations is able to circumvent the difficulty of handling the pressure variable in the primitive variable formulation or determining the vorticity values on the boundary in the stream function-vorticity formulation, and also ensure the divergence-free constraint condition of the magnetic field inherently.A test problem with the analytical solution, the well-studied lid-driven cavity problem in viscous fluid flow and the lid-driven MHD flow in a square cavity are performed to assess and verify the accuracy and the behavior of the method proposed currently. Numerical results for the present method are compared with the analytical solution and the other high-order accurate results. It is shown that the proposed stream function-velocity-magnetic induction compact difference method not only has the excellent performances in computational accuracy and efficiency, but also matches well with the divergence-free constraint of the magnetic field. Moreover, the benchmark solutions for the lid-driven cavity MHD flow in the presence of the aligned and transverse magnetic field for Reynolds number (Re) up to 5000 are provided for the wide range of magnetic Reynolds number (Rem) from 0.01 to 100 and Hartmann number (Ha) up to 4000.