Measurement methods and properties of anisotropic flows excited by bulk force

This paper presents a potential-difference method for experimental measurement of velocity characteristics in stable (unstable) shear flows and vortex structures generated in liquid metal by electromagnetic force in an external uniform magnetic field. These include averaged velocity and stream-function distributions, perturbation intensities and spectra and relations allowing estimation of the relative error for the relevance of the method. Using in this work a magnetic method allows measurement of drag coefficient at overflow a body; experiments with a cylinder parallel to the field at no large MHD interaction parameter are in good agreement with known works on investigation of cylinder drag coefficient without magnetic field. The method discovers a considerable decrease of cylinder drag coefficient at moderate this parameter. In order to study the dynamics of large-scale geostrophic nature flows in MHD laboratory scale, we performed a correlation of governing parameters and compared their values in these both cases. The results confirm a possibility of modelling of these flows.