Flow of a two-dimensional liquid metal jet in a strong magnetic field

Two-dimensional, steady flow of a liquid metal slender jet pouring from a nozzle in the presence of a transverse, nonuniform magnetic field is studied. The surface tension has been neglected, while gravity is shown to be not important. The main aim of the study is to evaluate the importance of the inertial effects. It has been shown that for gradually varying fields characteristic for the divertor region of a tokamak, inertial effects are negligible for N > 10, where N is the interaction parameter. Thus the inertialess flow model is expected to give good results even for relatively low magnetic fields and high jet velocity. Simple relations for the jet thickness and velocity have been derived. The results show that the jet becomes thicker if the field increases along the flow and thinner if it decreases