The effect of local thermal non-equilibrium on the onset of thermal instability for a metallic foam

Mixed convection in metallic foams modeled with Darcy's law under local thermal non-equilibrium conditions is investigated, where the solid phase thermal conductivity is assumed to be infinitely larger than its fluid phase counterpart. A linear and modal stability analysis was employed to evaluate the convective and absolute instability thresholds as well as their respective cell patterns. This analysis indicates that local thermal non-equilibrium always has a stabilizing effect and the spanwise uniform mode is always the most unstable. At the onset of convective instability, however, the number of equally unstable cell patterns increases with both the aspect ratio and the local thermal non-equilibrium strength.