On the stability of a hot rotating layer of micropolar fluid

The convective stability of a horizontal layer of incompressible micropolar fluid heated from below and rotating about a vertical axis has been investigated on the basis of linear theory, using normal mode analysis. The boundaries are assumed to be free. After introducing the corrections to the basic equations considered by Sastry and Rao [1], it has been found that the rotation has a destabilizing effect which contradicts the earlier assertion presented in [1].Moreover, microinertia, which does not affect the stability of a hot horizontal layer of incompressible micropolar fluid in the absence of rotation [2], is found to have destabilizing effect.