Porous convection with local thermal non-equilibrium temperatures and with cattaneo effects in the solid

Abstract

There is increasing interest in convection in local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) porous media. This is where the solid skeleton and the fluid may have different temperatures. There is also increasing interest in thermal wave motion, especially at the microscale and nanoscale, and particularly in solids. Much of this work has been based on the famous model proposed by Carlo Cattaneo in 1948. In this paper, we develop a model for thermal convection in a fluid-saturated Darcy porous medium allowing the solid and fluid parts to be at different temperatures. However, we base our thermodynamics for the fluid on Fourier's law of heat conduction, whereas we allow the solid skeleton to transfer heat by means of the Cattaneo heat flux theory. This leads to a novel system of partial differential equations involving Darcy's law, a parabolic fluid temperature equation and effectively a hyperbolic solid skeleton temperature equation. This system leads to novel physics, and oscillatory convection is found, whereas for the standard LTNE Darcy model, this does not exist. We are also able to derive a rigorous nonlinear global stability theory, unlike work in thermal convection in other second sound systems in porous media. © 2013 The Authors.