On compressible flow in a Rotating Cylinder

In this paper the almost isothermal rigid body rotation of a perfect gas in a cylinder is studied in detail, with special reference to present day gas centrifuges used for uranium enrichment. Emphasis is given to the effect of the length-to-radius ratio and to the effect of the radial density gradient associated with the basic isothermal rigid body rotation. It appears that the solutions mentioned form special cases in a much more general family of solutions with the Ekman number, the length-to-radius ratio and the ratio of the circumferential speed to the most probable molecular speed of the gas as parameters.