| Abstract: | In contrast to the corresponding viscous flow, the convective flow of a homogeneous liquid in a planar vertical layer whose boundaries are maintained at different temperatures is stable 1]. When a porous layer is saturated with a binary mixture, in the presence of potentially stable stratification one must expect an instability of thermal-concentration nature to be manifested. This instability mechanism is associated with the difference between the temperature and concentration relaxation times, which leads to a buoyancy force when an element of the fluid is displaced horizontally. In viscous binary mixtures, the thermal-concentration instability is the origin of the formation of layered flows, which have been studied in detail in recent years 2–4]. The convective instability of the equilibrium of a binary mixture in a porous medium was considered earlier by the present authors in 5]. In the present paper, the stability of stationary convective flow of a binary mixture in a planar vertical porous layer is studied. It is shown that in the presence of sufficient longitudinal stratification the flow becomes unstable against thermal-concentration perturbations; the stability boundary is determined as a function of the parameters of the problem.Translated from Izvestiya Akademii Nauk SSSR, Mekhanika Zhidkosti i Gaza, No. 1, pp. 150–157, January–February, 1980. |
