Steady rotating-frame Bernoulli integral Created 2026-10-06 Updated 2026-11-05
For steady flow of constant-density fluid in a uniformly rotating frame with conservative body forces, the displayed quantity is constant along each relative streamline. The centrifugal potential contributes the negative quadratic term, and the Coriolis force contributes no work because it is perpendicular to the relative velocity. The result follows by dotting the rotating Euler equations for an inviscid fluid with that velocity.
Uniform solid-body rotation adds the centrifugal potential to the gravitational potential. In the corotating frame, hydrostatic equilibrium becomes . The Poisson equation gives . On regular connected equipotential surfaces, is constant; taking the curl shows that is constant too. Uniform composition and an invertible equation of state then make constant on each such surface. These statements do not require to be constant there.