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2 Publications

Dynamo experiments: where we stand and where we go

Stefani, F.; Gerbeth, G.; Gailitis, A.; Lielausis, O.; Platacis, E.

It was a nice coincidence that, after years of preparations, the liquid sodium dynamo facilities in Riga and Karlsruhe had become operative nearly simultaneously at the end of 1999. Since those pioneering times, there have been many additional runs in either place, yielding a wealth of reproducible data on the kinematic as well as on the saturated regime. The accompanying numerical work has got some maturity and shows, by now, a reasonable correspondence with the experimental results. The results of the two experiments are complementary rather than redundant as they cover the paradigmatic cases of a large scale dynamo (Riga) and a mean-field dynamo (Karlsruhe). With the main focus on the results and the interpretation of the Riga dynamo experiment, we give a summary of what has been achieved so far and what is left for future dynamo experiments. In particular, we demonstrate that the saturation mechanism of the Riga dynamo experiment is already a non-trivial one as it relies heavily on the change of the flow structure due to the back-reaction of the self-excited magnetic field. We comment on the envisioned dynamo experiments in non-rotating and rotating spheres and ask what geodynamo simulation could learn from
them.

  • Abstract in refereed journal
    Geophysical Research Abstracts 6(2004), 02933
  • Invited lecture (Conferences)
    European Geosciences Union, 1st General Assembly, 25.-30.04.2004, Nice, France

Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-5996
Publ.-Id: 5996