Stability of natural convection of power-law fluid and non-Darcy flow in porous media.

In the present work the effect of the power law exponent of power-law fluid and non-Darcy number of non-Darcy flow on stability of natural convection in porous media are studied. The computation analysis of effect of power-law exponent of power-law fluid and non-Darcy number of non-Darcy flow in the rectangular duct on the transition Rayleigh number Ra*, which means the convective model transiting from stationary state to periodic solution. The duct has filled a porous medium saturated with the power-law non-Newtonian fluid or Newtonian fluid for non-Darcy flow, in which there is uniform internal heat generation per unit volume q. In this paper the relationship between the transition Rayleigh number Ra* and the power-law exponent n, Ra* and non-Darcy number Be, are shown. To these two aspects, the transition route from steady to chaotic convection is also obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]