THERMAL INSTABILITY OF A NANOFLUID SATURATING A ROTATING ANISOTROPIC POROUS MEDIUM

The present work aims at studying the thermal instability in a rotating anisotropic porous layer saturated by a nanofluid. The model used for nanofluid combines the effect of Brownian motion along with thermophoresis, while for a porous medium the Darcy model has been used. Using linear stability analysis the expression for the critical Rayleigh number has been obtained in terms of various nondimensional parameters. The effect of various parameters on the onset of instability has been presented graphically and discussed in detail. Bottom-heavy and top-heavy arrangements of nanoparticles are shown to prefer oscillatory and stationary modes of convection, respectively. Several results are obtained as limiting cases of the present study.