Introduction

Abstract

This book focusses on thermal convection problems which are likely to be of interest in microfluidic situations, i.e. where the dimensions of the spatial configuration of the phenomenon are very small, although not exclusively so since some of the topics will be of interest in their own right at the macro scale. In particular, much attention is directed at thermal convection flow problems in a porous medium where the fluid temperature, $T_f$, may be different from the solid skeleton temperature, $T_s$. This situation where the two temperatures may be different is usually referred to as local thermal non-equilibrium, abbreviated to LTNE. One of the driving reasons for the increased attention of LTNE flows in porous media is the numerous amount of applications of this area in real life.