Long-time behaviour of multi-component fluid mixtures in porous media

The long-time behaviour of a triply convective-diffusive fluid mixture saturating a porous horizontal layer in the Darcy-Oberbeck-Boussinesq scheme, is investigated. It is shown that the L-2- solutions are bounded, uniquely determined (by the initial and boundary data) and asymptotically converging toward an absorbing set of the phase-space. The stability analysis of the conduction solution is performed. The linear stability is reduced to the stability of ternary systems of O.D.Es and hence to algebraic inequalities. The existence of an instability area between stability areas of the thermal Rayleigh number (instability island), is found analytically when the layer is heated and salted (at least by one salt) from below. The validity of the linearization principle and the global nonlinear asymptotic stability of the conduction solution when all three effects are either destabilizing or stabilizing, are obtained via a symmetrization. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.