The onset of convection in a nanofluid saturated porous layer using Darcy model with cross diffusion

Abstract

Linear and nonlinear stability analysis for the onset of convection in a horizontal layer of a porous medium saturated by a nanofluid is studied. The model used for the nanofluid incorporates the effects of Brownian motion and thermophoresis. The modified Darcy equation that includes the time derivative term is used to model the momentum equation. In conjunction with the Brownian motion, the nanoparticle fraction becomes stratified, hence the viscosity and the conductivity are stratified. The nanofluid is assumed to be diluted and this enables the porous medium to be treated as a weakly heterogeneous medium with variation, in the vertical direction, of conductivity and viscosity. The critical Rayleigh number, wave number for stationary and oscillatory mode and frequency of oscillations are obtained analytically using linear theory and the non-linear analysis is made with minimal representation of the truncated Fourier series analysis involving only two terms. The effect of various parameters on the stationary and oscillatory convection is shown pictorially. We also study the effect of time on transient Nusselt number and Sherwood number which is found to be oscillatory when time is small. However, when time becomes very large both the transient Nusselt value and Sherwood value approaches to their steady state values. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.