This paper focuses on a 2D magnetohydrodynamic system with only horizontal dissipation in the domain $\Omega = \mathbb {T}\times \mathbb {R}$ with $\mathbb {T}=[0,\,1]$ being a periodic box. The goal here is to understand the stability problem on perturbations near the background magnetic field $(1,\,0)$. Due to the lack of vertical dissipation, this stability problem is difficult. This paper solves the desired stability problem by simultaneously exploiting two smoothing and stabilizing mechanisms: the enhanced dissipation due to the coupling between the velocity and the magnetic fields, and the strong Poincaré type inequalities for the oscillation part of the solution, namely the difference between the solution and its horizontal average. In addition, the oscillation part of the solution is shown to converge exponentially to zero in $H^{1}$ as $t\to \infty$. As a consequence, the solution converges to its horizontal average asymptotically.

In this paper we propose a development of the finite difference method, called the tailored finite point method, for solving steady magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) duct flow problems with a high Hartmann number. When the Hartmann number is large, the MHD duct flow is convection-dominated and thus its solution may exhibit localized phenomena such as the boundary layer. Most conventional numerical methods can not efficiently solve the layer problem because they are lacking in either stability or accuracy. However, the proposed tailored finite point method is capable of resolving high gradients near the layer regions without refining the mesh. Firstly, we devise the tailored finite point method for the scalar inhomogeneous convection-diffusion problem, and then extend it to the MHD duct flow which consists of a coupled system of convection-diffusion equations. For each interior grid point of a given rectangular mesh, we construct a finite-point difference operator at that point with some nearby grid points, where the coefficients of the difference operator are tailored to some particular properties of the problem. Numerical examples are provided to show the high performance of the proposed method.