Thermal convection in a magnetized conducting fluid with the Cattaneo-Christov heat-flow model.

By substituting the Cattaneo-Christov heat-flow model for the more usual parabolic Fourier law, we consider the impact of hyperbolic heat-flow effects on thermal convection in the classic problem of a magnetized conducting fluid layer heated from below. For stationary convection, the system is equivalent to that studied by Chandrasekhar ( 1961), and with free boundary conditions we recover the classical critical Rayleigh number [Formula: see text] which exhibits inhibition of convection by the field according to [Formula: see text] as [Formula: see text], where is the Chandrasekhar number. However, for oscillatory convection we find that the critical Rayleigh number [Formula: see text] is given by a more complicated function of the thermal Prandtl number [Formula: see text], magnetic Prandtl number [Formula: see text] and Cattaneo number . To elucidate features of this dependence, we neglect [Formula: see text] (in which case overstability would be classically forbidden), and thereby obtain an expression for the Rayleigh number that is far less strongly inhibited by the field, with limiting behaviour [Formula: see text], as [Formula: see text]. One consequence of this weaker dependence is that onset of instability occurs as overstability provided exceeds a threshold value (); indeed, crucially we show that when is large, [Formula: see text], meaning that oscillatory modes are preferred even when itself is small. Similar behaviour is demonstrated in the case of fixed boundaries by means of a novel numerical solution.