The Effect of Spatially Nonuniform Internal Heating on the Onset of Convection in a Horizontal Fluid Layer

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the onset of natural convection in a horizontal fluid layer due to nonuniform internal heat generation, which is relevant to a number of geophysical situations. We investigated a number of special cases, which we believe are paradigmatic. Those include linear, quadratic, concentrated, and exponential source strength distributions. Our results show that those situations that lead to a reduction/increase in the size of the region in which the basic temperature gradient is destabilizing lead to an increase/decrease in stability.