MHD Playground

Drag across the field lines to stir a magnetized fluid. Bent field lines pull back like rubber bands, and opposite ones pushed together reconnect.

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Color shows Grid

Parameters

The field lies in the plane, so it is the curl of a single flux function A, whose contours are the field lines drawn here, and the flow carries A along like dye. The fluid is incompressible, pushed by the Lorentz force J × B, and solved on your GPU with Stam’s “Stable Fluids” method on a grid that wraps around at its edges. Reconnection is set by the resistivity and the grid’s own diffusion. Source on GitHub.