This work aims to investigate, by means of numerical simulation, the evolution of free surface flow in aluminium production cells, and especially the magnetohydrodynamic instabilities. We design a numerical method combining a level-set technique together with a finite element discretization, in order to solve the non-stationnary Navier-Stokes equations and the equation for the motion of the free surface. Our numerical experiments confirms results obtained by other authors and we study the evolution of instabilities calculated by a stationary program, ALUCELL.