Mechanisms of energy conversion in induction magnetohydrodynamic pumps for transporting conducting liquids

Ruijie Zhao, Xiaohui Dou, Jun Huang, Desheng Zhang, Di Xia and Xing Zhang

Energy, 2022, vol. 244, issue PB

Abstract: Efficiency of energy conversion in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pumps is relatively lower compared with conventional mechanical pumps. The processes of energy conversion in an induction MHD pump are identified and the energy efficiencies of the processes are evaluated based on the numerical simulations. Two numerical models with different geometrical dimensions are built to simulate all involved processes. The results illustrate that vortices suddenly occur in the pump channel when the flow rate reduces below a critical value. The size and scale of the vortices are dependent on the modeling dimension. By analyzing the energy conversion among different forms of energy, it is demonstrated that the energy conversion is strongly correlated with the vortex flow. The appearing vortices at low flow rates result in both large Ohmic dissipation and negative power of Lorentz force, which are the main obstructions for energy transfer from the input power to the fluid pressure energy. In addition, the overall efficiency of this machine is estimated using the model containing external components (e.g., coils, stators and ducts). It is found that the energy dissipation in the external components plays an increasing role of reducing the energy efficiency with the increasing flow rate.

Keywords: Energy conversion; Energy efficiency; Electromagnetic machine; MHD Flow; Flow instability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544222000603
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:244:y:2022:i:pb:s0360544222000603

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2022.123157

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().