The Effects of Combined Horizontal and Vertical Heterogeneity on the Onset of Convection in a Porous Medium with Vertical Throughflow

The effects of hydrodynamic and thermal heterogeneity, for the case of variation in both the horizontal and vertical directions, on the onset of convection in a horizontal layer of a saturated porous medium uniformly heated from below, with weak vertical throughflow, are studied analytically for the case of weak heterogeneity. It is found that when the boundary conditions at the upper and lower boundaries are symmetric, the throughflow magnitude and the permeability and conductivity gradients enter the expression for the critical Rayleigh number at second order. The throughflow on its own is stabilizing but the combination of throughflow and heterogeneity may be either stabilizing or destabilizing.