Global nonlinear stability of convection in a heat generating fluid filled channel with a moving boundary

Abstract

The energy method is employed to investigate the stability of a steady convective flow in a heat generating fluid arising due to the combined effect of buoyancy, shear and pressure gradient. By introducing a suitable generalized energy functional and using energy inequalities sufficient conditions for the existence of such a flow are found. An analysis through the variational principles is then made to find sharper limits for nonlinear stability. Comparisons are made with linear results in the literature and it is shown that the linear theory fails to capture the physics of the onset of secondary flow.