Calmed Ohmic Heating for the 2D Magnetohydrodynamic-Boussinesq System: Global Well-posedness and Convergence

Abstract

When an electric current runs through a fluid, it generates heat via a process known as ``Ohmic heating'' or ``Joule heating.'' While this phenomenon, and its quantification known as Joule's Law, is the first studied example of heat generation via an electric field, many difficulties still remain in understanding its consequences. In particular, a magnetic fluid naturally generates an electric field via Amp\`ere's law, which heats the fluid via Joule's law. This heat in turn gives rise to convective effects in the fluid, creating complicated dynamical behavior. This has been modeled (in other works) by including an Ohmic heating term in the Magnetohydrodynamic-Boussinessq (MHD-B) equation. However, the structure of this term causes major analytical difficulties, and basic questions of well-posedness remain open problems, even in the two-dimensional case. Moreover, standard approaches to finding a globally well-posed approximate model, such as filtering or adding high-order diffusion, are not enough to handle the Ohmic heating term. In this work, we present a different approach that we call ``calming'', which reduces the effective algebraic degree of the Ohmic heating term in a controlled manner. We show that this new model is globally well-posed, and moreover, its solutions converge to solutions of the MHD-B system with the Ohmic heating term (assuming that solutions to the original equation exist), making it the first globally well-posed approximate model for the MHD-B equation with Ohmic heating.