Nature of the Neutral State in Convective Instability in a Horizontal Fluid Layer with Internal Heat Generation

Abstract

The nature of the neutral state in convective instability in a horizontal fluid layer with uniformly distributed internal heat sources is investigated using linear stability theory. The power series method is adopted to obtain the eigenvalue equation which is then computed numerically. It is shown that, as assumed before, the neutral state is indeed a stationary rather than an oscillatory one.