Thermal instability of a horizontal layer of micropolar fluid with heat source (Q1059456)

All the many papers which are concerned with this subject consider a linear profile of temperature. In the present paper, starting from the fact that there are many practical situations in which the temperature profile must be nonlinear, the authors investigate the effect of a uniform distribution of heat source, which gives rise to a nonlinear temperature profile in the equilibrium state, on the stability of a horizontal layer of micropolar fluid heated from below. In the second section the authors give the formulation of the characteristic value problem for thermal instability which is solved in the third section using a variational method. In the fourth section they establish that heat source and heat sink have the same effect on micropolar fluid and in the fifth section some numerical results are presented.