On-off intermittency and hard turbulence in the flow of fluid in the magnetic field.

This work provides an analysis of experiments in which various modes of mercury flow in a constant external magnetic field were observed; we examined the temperature oscillations in the mercury flow in a heated pipe at various Reynolds and Hartmann numbers. In some modes, the temperature oscillations have specific forms of strong aperiodic "bursts" over the weak irregular background, which are specific to the developed turbulent flow. To determine the nature of these temperature oscillations and the characteristics of the fluid flow, we examined them through the apparatus of nonlinear dynamics. The totality of all the results (autocorrelation function, correlation integral, maximum Lyapunov exponents, and Fourier transform) provide evidence of the chaotic nature of the observed flow modes despite the relative weakness of high-frequency harmonics in comparison to low-frequency ones. In the case of separate bursts of turbulence, the duration of the laminar phase τ follows the known distribution ∼τ-3/2, derived from the theory of on-off intermittency.