On Electroconvection Between Nonparallel Electrodes and Its Possible Use to Model General Atmospheric Circulation

From the knowledge of ionic injection from metal electrodes in an insulating liquid, the modeling of geophysical flows is proposed. More particularly, it would be desirable to the general atmospheric circulation with a laboratory experiment where an insulating liquid, lying between two metal electrodes (a spherical one and an ellipsoid one) is subjected to both an electric force and the effect of rotation around an axis. The first step in solving this problem is to study the hydrodynamic stability of an insulating incompressible liquid layer lying between two concentric conducting spheres subjected to a unipolar injection by one or the other of the two spheres. The linear critical conditions are determined for various values of the different parameters. Secondly, we take into account the ellipticity of one electrode in a circulation model by studying the flow of a liquid between two planes lying at a small angle to each other. The experiments exhibit such a flow in conditions where volumic conduction is still dominant. An explanation is proposed which accounts for the variation law and the order of magnitude of the liquid velocity.