Competition between two directions of convective rolls in a horizontal porous layer, non-uniformly heated (Q1111876)

The appearance of convection is studied in a saturated porous layer heated from below. When the thermal boundary conditions and the physical properties of the solid matrix are uniform, this phenomenon is described by an evolution equation which for every value of the filtration Rayleigh number Ra possesses a solution with an identically null filtration speed. For a critical value \(Ra_ c\) of Ra, this configuration loses its stability, and new asymptotically stable equilibria appear. The one towards which the system evolves is determined only by initial conditions. Experiments generally cannot control the homogeneity of data like thermal boundary conditions or the porosity of the solid matrix. These difficulties can explain why repeated experiments produce one type of convective rolls, in a box whose aspect ratios should in the purely homogeneous case lead indifferently to two types of rolls. We study what happens when the data is not exactly uniform. This kind of situation generally favors one branch of equilibrium points, in a sense which we will specify.