Triply resonant penetrative convection

A thermal convection model is considered that consists of a layer of viscous incompressible fluid contained between two horizontal planes. Gravity is acting vertically downward, and the fluid has a density maximum in the active temperature range. A heat source/sink that varies with vertical height is imposed. It is shown that in this situation there are three possible (different) sub-layers that may induce convective overturning instability. The possibility of resonance between the motion in these layers is investigated. A region is discovered where a very sharp increase in Rayleigh number is observed. In addition to a linearized instability analysis, two global (unconditional) nonlinear stability thresholds are derived.

Sharp global nonlinear stability for a fluid overlying a highly porous material

The stability of convection in a two-layer system in which a layer of fluid with a temperature-dependent viscosity overlies and saturates a highly porous material is studied. Owing to the difficulties associated with incorporating the nonlinear advection term in the Navier–Stokes equations into a stability analysis, previous literature on fluid/porous thermal convection has modelled the fluid using the linear Stokes equations. This paper derives global stability for the full nonlinear system, by utilizing a model proposed by Ladyzhenskaya. The nonlinear stability boundaries are shown to be sharp when compared with the linear instability thresholds.