Gill's problem in a sandwiched porous slab

The classical Gill's stability problem for stationary and parallel buoyant flow in a vertical porous slab with impermeable and isothermal boundaries kept at different temperatures is reconsidered from a different perspective. A three-layer slab is studied instead of a homogeneous slab as in Gill's problem. The three layers have a symmetric configuration where the two external layers have a high thermal conductivity, while the core layer has a much lower conductivity. A simplified model is set up where the thermal conductivity ratio between the external layers and the internal core is assumed as infinite. It is shown that a flow instability in the sandwiched porous slab may arise with a sufficiently large Rayleigh number. It is also demonstrated that this instability coincides with that predicted in a previous analysis for a homogeneous porous layer with permeable boundaries, by considering the limiting case where the permeability of the external layers is much larger than that of the core layer.