The Onset of Convection in a Heterogeneous Porous Medium with Vertical Throughflow

The effect of vertical heterogeneity of permeability, on the onset of convection in a horizontal layer of a saturated porous medium, uniformly heated from below but with a non-uniform basic temperature gradient resulting from vertical throughflow, is studied analytically using linear stability theory. It is found that, to first order, a linear variation of the reciprocal of permeability with depth has no effect on the critical value of the Rayleigh number Ra _c based on the harmonic mean of the permeability, but a quadratic variation increasing in the upwards direction leads to a reduction in Ra _c.