Staggered grids discretization in three-dimensional Darcy convection

We consider three-dimensional convection of an incompressible fluid saturated in a parallelepiped with a porous medium. A mimetic finite-difference scheme for the Darcy convection problem in the primitive variables is developed. It consists of staggered nonuniform grids with five types of nodes, differencing and averaging operators on a two-nodes stencil. The nonlinear terms are approximated using special schemes. Two problems with different boundary conditions are considered and two different scenarios of instability of the state of rest are found. One of them admits branching off of the continuous family of steady states with variable stability spectra (cosymmetric family).