Natural convection of magnetic fluid in a rectangular Hele-Shaw cell

The nature convection of a magnetic fluid in a square Hele-Shaw cell is studied experimentally with heat transfer measurements and liquid crystal thermography. Both results show that the vertically imposed magnetic field has destabilizing influence. The flow instability modes become different from that in two-dimensional cavity cases, with and without the magnetic field. A pair of symmetric counter-rotating vortices is observed for the first instability mode.