Impact of Soft Iron impellers in the Cadarache Dynamo experiment

Numerical simulations of the kinematic induction equation are performed on a model configuration of the Cadarache von-Karman-Sodium dynamo experiment. The effect of a localized axisymmetric distribution of relative permeability that represents soft iron material within a flow of a conducting fluid is investigated. We observe a purely toroidal axisymmetric mode localized in the impeller disks which becomes dominant for sufficiently large permeability. In this limit, the toroidal mode is close to the onset of dynamo action with a (negative) growth-rate that is rather independent of the magnetic Reynolds number. We qualitatively explain this effect by paramagnetic pumping at the fluid/disk interface and propose a simplified analytical model that quantitatively reproduces numerical results. The crucial role of the high permeability disks for the mode selection in the Cadarache dynamo experiment cannot be inferred from computations that use idealized pseudo-vacuum boundary conditions.