The effects of suction on the nonlinear stability of a three-dimensional compressible boundary layer

Permanent address (for correspondence), School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. This study follows on from work by Bassom & Seddougui (1992,Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 436, 405–15) on the effects of suctionon the nonlinear stability of the three-dimensional incompressibleboundary layer induced by a rotating disc. This flow has twotypes of stationary instability, one corresponds to the upper-branchinviscid mode and the other to the lower-branch viscous mode.This latter instability is characterized by an effective velocityprofile which has a zero shear stress at the wall and, as inBassom & Seddougui (1992), it is on this mode that interestis focused here. The effect of suction on the compressible flow,and its subsequent instability, is shown to be significant.