This handbook systematically collects the latest scientific and technological knowledge on liquid metals obtained so far in this cutting edge frontier. Conventional materials such as metals, polymers, composites, ceramics and naturally derived matters, may not perform well when facing certain technological challenges. At around room temperature, most of such materials mainly stay at solid state and are often difficult to shape due to their high melting point. Meanwhile, although classical soft matters own good flexibility, their electrical conductivities including more behaviours appear not good enough which generally limited their utilizations. As a game-changing alternative, the room temperature liquid metal materials are quickly emerging as a new generation functional material which displayed many unconventional properties superior to traditional materials. Their outstanding versatile feature as “One material, diverse capabilities” is rather unique among existing materials and thus opens many exciting opportunities for scientific, technological and industrial developments. This handbook presents comprehensive reference information on liquid metal science and technology that are currently available. The major advancements as made before are collected and summarized. Representative liquid metal applications are illustrated. It helps readers obtain a comprehensive understanding of the technical progresses and fundamental discoveries in the frontier, and thus better explore and utilize liquid metal materials to address various challenging needs.

The book deals with the theme of incompressible flows of electrically conducting fluids in hydraulic components. The main content of the book is a result of engineering research associated with the design of liquid metal cooling systems for fusion reactors. The book is well suited to serve as a guide for utilising magnetohydrodynamic means in other engineering disciplines such as in material processing, metallurgical engineering and power engineering.

Liquid metal MHO is within the scope of two series of international conferences. One is the International Congress on "MHD Power Generation", held every four years, which includes technical and economical aspects as well as scientific questions. The other if the Beer-Sheva Seminar on "MHO Flows and Turbulence", held every three years in Israel. In addition to these well established meetings, an IUTAM Symposium was previously organized in Cambridge (UK) in 1982 on "Metallurgical Applications of MHD" by the late Arthur Shercliff. It was focussed on a very specific subject developing radiply from the middle of the 1970's. The magnetic field was generally AC, including frequencies high enough for the skin-depth to be much smaller than the typical length scale of the liquide pool. And the development of new technologies, or the improvement of existing ones, was the main justification of most of the researches presented and discussed. Only two participants from Eastern countries attended this Symposium. By the middle of the 1980's we felt that on this very same topic ideas had reached much more maturity than in 1982. We also realized that a line of research on MHD flows related to fusion reactors (tokamaks) was developing significantly, with particular emphasis on flows at large interaction parameter.