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.