No abstract

The dynamic behavior of convective motion in a confined porous medium saturated by a pure fluid under the action of mechanical vibration is studied. A redefinition of vibrational Rayleigh number is proposed from which we distinguish the domain of validity of the mean flow. The weakly nonlinear stability analysis performed demonstrates, contrary to published results, that the bifurcation is of supercritical nature and the subcritical branch does not exist. It is emphasized that, in order to find the thermal behavior of the system for the onset of convection, we should separate the vibrational effect from the thermal effect involving the temperature difference.

In this paper, we consider the effect of mechanical vibration on the onset of convection in porous media. The porous medium is saturated either by a pure fluid or by a binary mixture. The importance of a transport model on stability diagrams is presented and discussed. The stability threshold for the Darcy-Brinkman case in the Ra T c -R and k c -R diagrams is presented (where Ra T c , k c and R are the critical Rayleigh number, the critical wave number and the vibration parameters, respectively). It is shown that there is a significant deviation from the Darcy model. In the thermo-solutal case with the Soret effect, the influence of vibration on the reduction of multi-cellular convection is emphasized. A new analytical relation for obtaining the threshold of mono-cellular convection is derived. This relation shows how the separation factor is related to the controlling parameters of the problem, = f (R, ε * , Le), when the wave number k → 0. The importance of vibrational parameter definition is highlighted and it is shown how, by using a proper definition for vibrational parameter, we may obtain compact relationship. It is also shown how this result may be used to increase component separation.