Influence of boundary conditions on the convective stability of a rotating horizontal layer of liquid

A theoretical study is made of the critical curves for the onset of convection in a plane horizontal layer of liquid rotating with constant angular velocity for different conditions on the boundary of the layer. It is shown that the critical curves for a constant heat flux boudary condition are lower than those for the case of a constant temperature boundary, so that convection occurs earlier for all Taylor numbers. At large Taylor numbers all the stability curves tend to the asymptotes RC ∝ Ta2/3, where Ta is the Taylor number and RC is the critical Rayleigh number.