Natural convection in porous annular domains: Mimetic scheme and family of steady states

Natural convection of the incompressible fluid in the porous media based on the Darcy hypothesis (Lapwood convection) gives an intriguing branching off of one-parameter family of steady patterns. This scenario may be suppressed in computations when governing equations are approximated by schemes which do not preserve the cosymmetry property. We consider the problem for the annular porous domain in polar coordinates and derive a mimetic finite-difference scheme. This scheme allows to compute the family of convective regimes accurately and to detect the instabilities on some parts of the family.