A comparison of the reduction of convection by a magnetic field and a microgravity environment

The relative effectiveness of magnetic damping and the microgravity environment of space for suppressing buoyancy driven convection in semiconductor crystal melts was analyzed using flow estimates based on the convection driven by a single vertical heated plate. The results show that convection can be more than a factor of 10 weaker in space. If a strong magnetic field is applied in space, the convection can be reduced by a factor of 1000 over similarly magnetically damped convection in an earth-bound laboratory. The heated plate estimates were checked by comparing them with exact boundary layer theory for the nonmagnetic problem in the same configuration and they were found to be accurate.