Anisotropic bidispersive convection

Abstract

This paper investigates thermal convection in an anisotropic bidisperse porous medium. A bidisperse porous medium is one which possesses the usual pores, but in addition, there are cracks or fissures in the solid skeleton and these give rise to a second porosity known as micro porosity. The novelty of this paper is that the macro permeability and the micro permeability are each diagonal tensors but the three components in the vertical and in the horizontal directionsmay be distinct in both the macro and micro phases. Thus, there are six independent permeability coefficients. A linear instability analysis is presented and a fully nonlinear stability analysis is inferred. Several Rayleigh number and wavenumber calculations are presented and it is found that novel cell structures are predicted which are not present in the single porosity case.