• LINEAR ANALYSIS OF THERMAL INSTABILITY IN A POROUS MEDIUM SATURATED BY MAXWELL NANOFLUID

Abstract

In the present article onset of convection in a horizontal layer of porous medium saturated with a Maxwell nanofluid is studied by linear analysis. The modified Darcy-Maxell nanofluid model is used to simulate the momentum equation in porous media. The nanofluid incorporates Brownian motion and thermophoresis.A Galerkin method has been employed to investigate the stationary and oscillatory convections, the stability boundaries for these cases are approximated by simple and useful analytical expressions. To investigate the stability of the system, parameters such as Nanopartical concentration Rayleigh number, Lewis number, modified diffusivity ratio, Vadasz number and relaxation are varied. It is found that for stationary convection Lewis number and modified diffusivity ratio stabilizes the system where as Nanopartical concentration Rayleigh number and porosity destabilizes the system. For oscillatory convection the thermal capacity ratio stabilizes the system while nanopartical concentration Rayleigh number, Lewis number, porosity and vadas number destabilizes the system.