The Hartmann boundary layer is a paradigm of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows. Hartmann boundary layers develop when a liquid metal flows under the influence of a steady magnetic field. The present paper is an overview of recent successful attempts to understand the mechanisms by which the Hartmann layer undergoes a transition from laminar to turbulent flow.
What is a Hartmann boundary layer?When a viscous incompressible fluid flows laminarly in the gap between two unbounded plates separated from each other by a distance d, its velocity profile, shown in Figure 1a, is well known to be parabolic. When the fluid is electrically conducting and when a uniform steady magnetic field acts perpendicular to the channel walls, the structure of the flow changes drastically, as shown in Figure 1b