Destabilization of a liquid metal by nonuniform Joule heating.

We study the effect of an impressing AC magnetic field at the bottom of a liquid metal layer of thickness h. In this situation the fluid is set in motion by the buoyancy forces caused by internal heat sources. The heat sources, caused by the Joule effect induced by the AC field, present an exponentially decaying profile, with characteristic length δ. As the magnetic field is horizontal, the Lorentz force has no influence on the dynamics of the system since it contributes only to the magnetic pressure. We propose an analysis of both the transient and fully developed regimes using linear stability analysis (LSA) and direct numerical simulations (DNSs). The transient period is governed by the temporal evolution of the temperature field as well as the development of the convective instability, which can be concomitant and therefore requires adopting a transient LSA algorithm to track these two effects. The DNSs have been performed for various distributions of the heat sources and various total heat input. This corresponds to independently varying δ/h in the range 0.04≤δ/h≤0.45 and a Rayleigh number 1.1×10^{4}≤Ra≤1.2×10^{5}. We observe the relaxation of the temperature up to the steady conductive profile before the transition to the nonlinear regime when Ra is small, whereas for larger Ra, nonlinear effects appear during the relaxation of the temperature profile. The unsteadiness of the temperature field significantly alters the development of the instability because of a much smaller growth rate. Surprisingly, we observe that δ/h has only a limited influence on averaged quantities as well as on the patterns for both the linear and nonlinear regimes. This comes with the fact that the profiles present an apparent reflectional symmetry, despite the asymmetry of the governing equations.