Simulation of 3D MHD with free surface using open-source EOF-library: Levitating liquid metal in an alternating electromagnetic field

Numerical simulation tools for industrial magnetohydrodynamics are rare and in high demand, especially open-source codes that can be run on massively parallel computers. Recently, the finite element multi-physics simulation software Elmer was coupled with the computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM using parallel two-way coupler EOF-Library. In order to verify if the software is applicable to magnetohydrodynamic problems involving alternating electromagnetic fields and conducting fluids with a free surface, we perform a 3D numerical simulation of levitating liquid metal in an alternating electromagnetic field and compare our results with the results of similar numerical simu- lations and experiment. Considering that our simulation formulation has differences from the reference, we got an acceptable agreement for the melt surface shape and velocities. We also reproduced spinning of the melt which was observed in experiment, but yet we are unable to find the source of azimuthal acceleration and flattened faces with vertical edges.