INVESTIGATION OF THE ELECTROCONVECTIVE FLOW
OF A WEAKLY CONDUCTING LIQUID WITH UNIPOLAR
INJECTION CONDUCTIVITY BY THE FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD

I. A. Ermolaev and A. I. Zhbanov

UDC 537.8:532.5

The electroconvective flow of a weakly conducting liquid 
dielectric in a plane-parallel electrode system is investigated by 
the finite-element method of Galerkin in the vicinity of the crisis 
of equilibrium-stability loss. The threshold value of the strength 
of a homogeneous electric field (corresponding to the occurrence of 
stationary two-dimensional spatially periodic flow structures) is 
determined. The empirical relation for the extremum of the current 
function in the vicinity of the crisis is obtained. The distribution 
of the volume density of charges over the interelectrode gap in the 
ascending and descending convective flows is found.

N. G. Chernyshevskii Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia; 
email: ZhbanovAI@info.sgu.ru. 
Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 75, No. 5, 
pp. 96-99, September-October, 2002. Original article submitted 
February 22, 2002.

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