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COMPUTERS & MATHEMATICS WITH APPLICATIONS, vol.64, no.6, pp.1740-1751, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
Convection in a porous medium may produce strong nonuniqueness of patterns. we study this phenomena for the case of a multicomponent fluid and develop a mimetic finite-difference scheme for the three-dimensional problem. Discretization of the Darcy equations in the primitive variables is based on staggered grids with five types of nodes and on a special approximation of nonlinear terms. This scheme is applied to the computer study of flows in a porous parallelepiped filled by a two-component fluid and with two adiabatic lateral planes. We found that the continuous family of steady stable states exists in the case of a rather thin enclosure. When the depth is increased, only isolated convective regimes may be stable. We demonstrate that the non-mimetic approximation of nonlinear terms leads to the destruction of the continuous family of steady states. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.