ABSTRACT
In this chapter we shall study under what conditions the mechanical equilibrium of a shallow liquid layer becomes unstable, and what kind of flows will appear as the result of an interfacial instability due to the Marangoni effect (Benard-Marangoni convection). We shall consider the paradigmatic problem experimentally studied by Benard about the evolution of a horizontal liquid layer uniformly heated from below that, however, yields an inhomogeneous, cellular, structure.
