Experimental investigation of time-dependent flow driven by a travelling magnetic field

Recently, the flow generated by a travelling magnetic field (TMF) has received increasing attention. This comprises industrial applications in crystal growth as well as basic research on stability and on time-dependent flow for higher values of the forcing parameter, the latter aiming at metallurgical processes. Whereas the flow driven by rotating magnetic fields (RMF) might be said to be fairly understood, this does not hold for the TMF. Moreover, there exist experimental investigations on RMFs but studies on TMF almost restrict to numerical simulations. Also in the case of an RMF, most experiments dealt only with the mean flow. The present work is devoted to both mean flow and turbulence in an electrically conducting melt subjected to a TMF.