FINITE-AMPLITUDE BENARD CONVECTION IN A CYLINDRICAL CONTAINER .2.

This paper extends the work of Part 1 in which the onset of finite amplitude Benard convection in a shallow cylindrical container of large radius L with an imperfectly insulated sidewall was investigated. In the present study, the effect of finite log L is examined, in which case the solutions of the amplitude equation have a weak singularity at the origin. It is demonstrated that as (log L)** minus **1 yields 0 the critical Rayleigh number is less, by an amount O(L** minus **2), than its value when (log L)** minus **1 equals 0 and is in agreement with the value obtained for the two-dimensional annulus.