The study of the squeezing flow between two planes is of special interest for application to bearings with liquid-meta~ lubrications. The interaction of the flowing liquid-metal lubricant with the applied magnetic field can be used to increase the total load which the rotor can support and reduce the viscous drag on the rotor. Studies on the effects of magnetic field in lubrication were made by Hughes and Elco [1], Kuzma et al.[2], Krieger et al.[3] and Kamiyama [4]. In these investigations they considered the magnetic force term but neglected some or all the inertia terms in the Navier-Stokes equations. Hamza [5] studied the squeezing flow between two discs in the presence of a magnetic field acting perpendicular to the discs by taking into account all the inertia terms. In a subsequent paper [6] he obtained a similarity solution where the axial magnetic field is assumed to be of particular time-dependent form.

The study of similarity solutions for the steady motion of an incompressible viscous fluid contained between two rotating discs was initiated by Batchelor [7]. Using yon Karmas similarity transformation the governing equations were reduced to two coupled fourth-order diffferentiai equations. The solutions were obtained by employing a shooting method by Lance and Rogers [8]. Subsequently, Holodniok [9] used finite differencing and Newton's iteration for obtaining solutions at higher Reynolds number. A detailed review of these studies was made by Zandbergen