Weakly coupled thermo electric and MHD m

In the present study, the full 3D thermo-electric model of a 500 kA demonstration cell has been weakly coupled with the non-linear wave MHD model of the full version of the same cell. In the MHD model, the horizontal ledge distribution calculated in the thermo-electric model has been incorporated as part of the model geometry. In the thermo-electric model, the velocity fields calculated by the MHD model in both the bath and the metal have been used to setup the local heat transfer coefficients at the liquids/ledge interface. Both models have been solved alternatively until a convergence for the horizontal ledge distribution has been obtained. The MHD model has been upgraded with the transiently coupled ferromagnetics solution module, ledge input and with an optimized bus-bar arrangement for a stable 500 kA cell suitable for commercial application. A first weakly coupled thermo-electric and MHD run has been successfully carried out. Only two iterations of the weakly coupled convergence loop were required because the non-linear coupling effects turned out to be not very significant in the present case. Nevertheless, those two iterations required 98 CPU hours on a P4 3.2 GHz computer.