The normal field instability under side-wall effects: comparison of experiments and computations
arXiv:0904.3864 · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/11/5/053016
Abstract
We consider a single spike of ferrofluid, arising in a small cylindrical container, when a vertically oriented magnetic field is applied. The height of the spike as well as the surface topography is measured experimentally by two different technologies and calculated numerically using the finite element method. As a consequence of the finite size of the container, the numerics uncovers an imperfect bifurcation to a single spike solution, which is forward. This is in contrast to the standard transcritical bifurcation to hexagons, common for rotational symmetric systems with broken up-down symmetry. The numerical findings are corroborated in the experiments. The small hysteresis observed is explained in terms of a hysteretic wetting of the side wall.
accepted to New Journal of Physics
References in corpus (4)
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- The Surface Topography of a Magnetic Fluid -- a Quantitative Comparison between Experiment and Numerical Simulation
- Pattern and wavenumber selection in ferrofluids
- Stripe-hexagon competition in forced pattern forming systems with broken up-down symmetry