Study of magnetohydrodynamic pulsatile flow in a constricted channel

Abstract

The present work reports the study of steady and pulsatile flows of an electrically conducting fluid in a differently shaped locally constricted channel in presence of an external transverse uniform magnetic field. The governing nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic equations simplified for low conducting fluids are solved numerically by finite difference method using stream function-vorticity formulation. The analysis reveals that the flow separation region is diminished with increasing values of magnetic parameter. It is noticed that the increase in the magnetic field strength results in the progressive flattening of axial velocity. The variations of wall shear stress with increasing values of the magnetic parameter are shown for both steady and pulsatile flow conditions. The streamline and vorticity distributions in magnetohydrodynamic flow are also shown graphically and discussed.