Oscillatory convection in a porous medium heated from below

Abstract

The stability of natural convective flow in a porous medium heated both uniformly and non-uniformly from below is studied in order to determine the possibility of oscillatory and other unsteady flows, and to explore the conditions under which they may occur. The results of the numerical work are directly comparable with experiments using a Hele Shaw cell and also, in the uniformly heated case, with the results of Combarnous & Le Fur (1969) and Caltagirone, Cloupeau & Combarnous (1971). It is shown that for the uniformly heated problem there exist, in certain cases, two distinct possible modes of flow, one of which is fluctuating, the other being steady. However in the non-uniformly heated case the boundary conditions force the solution into a unique mode of flow which is regularly oscillatory when there is considerable non-uniformity in the heat input at the lower boundary, provided that the Rayleigh number is sufficiently high.