Steady and Oscillatory Side-Band Instabilities in Marangoni Convection with Deformable Interface

Abstract

The stability of Marangoni roll convection in a liquid-gas system with deformable interface is studied in the case when there is a nonlinear interaction between two modes of Marangoni instability: long-scale surface deformations and short-scale convection. Within the framework of a model derived previously, it is shown that the nonlinear interaction between the two modes substantially changes the width of the band of stable wave numbers of the short-scale convection pattern as well as the type of the instability limiting the band. Depending on the parameters of the system, the instability can be either long- or short-wave, either monotonic or oscillatory. The stability boundaries strongly differ from the standard ones and sometimes exclude the band center. The long-wave limit of the side-band instability is studied in detail within the framework of the phase approximation. It is shown that the monotonic instability is always subcritical, while the long-wave oscillatory instability can be supercritical, leading to the formation of either travelling or standing waves modulating the pattern wavelength and the surface deformation.