Convective instability of the Darcy flow in a horizontal layer with symmetric wall heat fluxes and local thermal nonequilibrium

The linear stability of the parallel Darcy throughflow in a horizontal plane porous layer with impermeable boundaries subject to a symmetric net heating or cooling is investigated. The onset conditions for the secondary thermoconvective flow are expressed through a neutral stability bound for the Darcy-Rayleigh number associated with the uniform heat flux supplied or removed from the walls. The study is performed by taking into account a condition of local thermal nonequilibrium between the solid phase and the fluid phase. The linear stability analysis is carried out according to the normal modes' decomposition of the perturbations to the basic state. The governing equations for the disturbances are solved numerically as an eigenvalue problem leading to the neutral stability condition. If compared with the asymptotic condition of local thermal equilibrium, the regime of local nonequilibrium manifests an enhanced instability. This behavior is displayed by lower critical values of the Darcy-Rayleigh number, eventually tending to zero when the thermal conductivity of the solid phase is much larger than the conductivity of the fluid phase. In this special limit, which can be invoked as an approximate model of a gas-saturated metallic foam, the basic throughflow is always unstable to external disturbances of arbitrarily small amplitude.