In numerical linear stability investigations, the rates of change of the kinetic and thermal energy of the perturbation flow are often used to identify the dominant mechanisms by which kinetic or thermal energy is exchanged between the basic and the perturbation flow. Extending the conventional energy analysis for a single-phase Boussinesq fluid, the energy budgets of arbitrary infinitesimal perturbations to the basic two-phase liquid–gas flow are derived for an axisymmetric thermocapillary bridge when the material parameters in both phases depend on the temperature. This allows identifying individual transport terms and assessing their contributions to the instability if the basic flow and the critical mode are evaluated at criticality. The full closed-form energy budgets of linear modes have been derived for thermocapillary two-phase flow taking into account the temperature dependence of all thermophysical parameters. The influence of different approximations to the temperature dependence on the linear stability boundary of the axisymmetric flow in thermocapillary liquid bridges is tested regarding their accuracy. The general mechanism of symmetry breaking turns out to be very robust.

In this paper, a novel second-order two-scale (SOTS) computational method is developed for nonlinear dynamic thermo-mechanical problems of composites with cylindrical periodicity. The non-linearities of these multi-scale problems were caused by the temperature-dependent properties of the composites. Firstly, the formal SOTS solutions for these problems are constructed by the multiscale asymptotic analysis. Then we theoretically explain the importance of the SOTS solutions by the error analysis in the pointwise sense. In addition, a SOTS numerical algorithm is proposed in detail to effectively solve these problems. Finally, some numerical examples verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the SOTS numerical algorithm we proposed.