An analysis of the thermal instability of forced convection flow over isothermal horizontal flat plate (Q1098379)

Thermal instability of forced convection flow over an isothermal horizontal flat plate in the form of longitudinal vortices is examined by introducing three-dimensional spatial dependence of the perturbation quantities. The system of stability equations has been simplified significantly by considering the limiting case of very large Prandtl numbers and by seeking similarity solutions for the amplitude functions of the perturbation quantities. The effect of x-dependent temperature perturbation is shown to stabilize the flow as compared with x-dependent temperature perturbation, which explains very well the existent theoretical results and experimental observations.