Onset of convection in a porous medium with sidewall heat transfer

A linear stability analysis is developed for convection in a vertically oriented finite slab of saturated porous material. The large vertical sidewall surfaces admit heat transfer while the small endwalls are insulated. A vertical temperature difference is imposed between the upper and lower horizontal surfaces. Results are obtained from an asymptotic evaluation of the exact stability criteria for a rectangular parallelpiped in the limit of small gap width element of → 0, where element of = narrow horizontal dimension/height. The critical Rayleigh number R/sub c/ = 0(element of/sup -2/) when the heat transfer boundary condition is applied directly to the sidewall. The convection mode consists of tightly packed three-dimensional cells with a wave number α = 0(element of/sup -1/2/). Only when the effective Biot number is sufficiently small, 0(element of/sup 2/), are the classical results approached; R/sub c/ → 4π/sup 2/, α/sub c/ = 0(1). If the slab is sandwiched between two impermeable conducting blocks with horizontal extent similar to the slab height, then the small scale modes disappear and R/sub c/ = 0(element of/sup -1/). However, sufficiently thin conducting blocks are compatible with R/sub c/ = 0(element of/sup -2/) and α = 0(element of/sup -1/2/