No label defined (Q4336843)

This paper examines the influence of relaxational characteristics on the development of thermal convection in linear viscoelastic liquids. Three specific experimental situations are considered, the first of which is convection in a horizontal planar layer confined between flat plates of infinite extent with the temperature kept fixed at the bounding plates. Utilising the Boussinesq approximation, the authors follow Lorenz by expanding the associated stream function and the perturbation in temperature as a series of eigenfunctions pertaining to the linear problem. The resulting nonlinear dynamical system is the well-known Lorenz system for a viscous Newtonian liquid albeit with a modified Prandtl number, which depends on two relaxation times associated with the linear model employed by Oldroyd to describe the liquid's rheological behaviour. The second problem investigates convective motion of the same material in a horizontal porous layer. However, to describe the nonequilibrium effects they wish to model, the authors employ a modified form of Darcy's law. The resulting nonlinear dynamical system results in a Lorenz-like system in a special case, but a more complicated system arises in general case that has additional stationary solutions. The stability of these solutions is then examined for a variety of values of two relaxation times introduced through the modified Darcy law. The paper concludes with an investigation of convective motion of a linear viscoelastic liquid in a toroidal-shaped porous medium. It is shown that the solution to this problem is approximated by the same nonlinear system as that resulting in the previous problem, and so the results for the second problem can be carried over to the third problem without any alterations. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0841.00021].