The ‘Richardson’ criterion for compressible swirling flows

The stability of a compressible non-dissipative swirling flow to adiabatic infinitesimal disturbances of arbitrary orientation is considered. The resulting sufficient condition for stability is the general form of the effective Richardson criterion for swirling flows, first obtained, for axisymmetric modes only, by Howard. In addition, upper bounds to the growth rate of unstable modes are obtained and some extensions of the semicircle theorem to azimuthal disturbances are stated.