Penetrative and Marangoni convection in a fluid film over a phase boundary

Abstract

We study the effects of buoyancy, surface-tension gradients and phase boundary on the stability of a layer of water that is confined between air at the top and a layer of ice at the bottom. The temperature of the overlying air and flux condition at the free surface of the water layer are such that the layer is susceptible to both thermal and thermocapillary instabilities. We perform a linear stability analysis to identify these modes of instability and investigate the effects of the phase boundary on them. We find that with increasing thickness of the ice layer, the critical Rayleigh and Marangoni numbers for the instabilities are found to first decrease and then asymptote to constant values for ice thicknesses much larger than the thickness of the water layer. In the case of thermocapillary instability, we find that the thickness of the ice layer has negligible influence on the stability threshold for dimensionless wavenumber $k \gg 1$ , and that the presence of an unstably stratified liquid layer significantly alters the stability threshold for $k = O (1)$ . Furthermore, the inclusion of Marangoni stresses reduces the stability threshold of the thermal instability.