Ms. Malashetty et al., CONVECTIVE INSTABILITY IN A HORIZONTAL POROUS LAYER SATURATED WITH A CHEMICALLY REACTING FLUID, International journal of heat and mass transfer, 37(18), 1994, pp. 2901-2908
A linear stability analysis has been performed to study the onset of c
onvective instability in a horizontal inert porous layer saturated wit
h a fluid undergoing zero-order exothermic chemical reactions. The hor
izontal porous layer is cooled from the upper boundary while two diffe
rent thermal boundary conditions are imposed at the lower boundary, i.
e. an isothermal wall and an adiabatic wall. The resulting eigenvalue
problems were solved approximately using a single-term Galerkin method
that gives the critical Rayleigh number and the associate wave number
at a given Frank-Kamenetskii number. It is found that, with chemical
reactions, the fluid in the porous medium is more prone to instability
as compared to the case in which chemical reactions are absent.