Stability of cellular convection (Q1097787)

The authors study the stability of a cellular Bénard-type convection problem with temperature dependent material properties. Here the convection problem is formulated in an infinite-dimensional setting involving Boussinesq-type partial differential equations with an appropriate finite-dimensional reduction. Moreover, the number of critical wave vectors corresponding to a given critical wave number is GN (N\(\geq 1)\), where N can be arbitrarily large. Finally, the authors also study a generalized dissipation V introduced previously by the authors, ibid. 88, 163-193 (1985; Zbl 0599.76043). The ordering by values of V gives rise to a selection principle: if the system jumps from one stable state to another, it will always jump to a stable state with less dissipation. For more details one is referred to the above cited article and the references therein.