Thermal instability of an Oldroyd-B fluid-saturated porous layer: implications of pressure gradient and LTNE temperatures

Abstract

A local thermal nonequilibrium model is used to investigate the instability of an Oldroyd-B fluid-saturated horizontal layer of porous medium by imposing a constant pressure gradient in the horizontal direction and maintaining a constant temperature difference between the boundaries. The flow in the porous medium is studied by a modified Darcy–Oldroyd-B model. The problem has been transformed into a generalized complex eigenvalue problem and solved numerically by utilizing the Galerkin method. The pressure gradient and/or the viscoelasticity of the fluid instill oscillatory instability. The influence of constant horizontal pressure gradient is to hasten the onset of oscillatory convection: a result of contrast noticed in Newtonian fluids. The impact of constant horizontal pressure gradient is to increase the critical frequency of oscillations and to increase the size of convection cells. Besides, the effect of viscoelastic parameters on the oscillatory onset diminishes in the presence of pressure gradient. For the Maxwell fluid, instability sets in earlier compared to an Oldroyd-B fluid. The numerical results obtained under the limiting case are shown to be in excellent agreement with the published ones.