“…Swirling flows in general are of enormous interest due to their wide-spread occurrence in nature and in engineering practice such as in combustion systems (Syred, 2006), swirl chambers (Hedlund et al, 1999), cyclone separators (Murphy et al, 2007;Huard et al, 2010), vortex tubes for cyclone cooling (Seibold and Weigand, 2021), and thermal energy separation by swirl (Kobiela et al, 2018). They are also a class of flows where turbulence closures of the type used in engineering design have proved to be inadequate unless modified in some ad-hoc way (Kobayashi and Yoda, 1987;Chang and Chen, 1993;Gorbunova et al, 2016). In the flows of interest here, the imposition of a tangential component of velocity on the axial flow gives rise to an interesting phenomenon, namely the generation of a well-defined helical vortex that precesses around the tube's centerline.…”