The ‘plug’ flow emerging from a long rotating tube into a large stationary reservoir has been used in an experimental investigation of centrifugally unstable swirling jets. A moderate Reynolds number, $\hbox{\it Re}\,{=}\,1000$, was studied extensively, and swirl numbers, $S$, the ratio of nozzle exit rotating speed to the mean mass axial velocity, were in the range 0–1.1. Four regimes were covered: non-swirling jets with $S\,{=}\,0$, weakly swirling jets in the range $0\,{<}\,S\,{<}\,S_{c1}$, strongly swirling jets before vortex breakdown with $S_{c1}\,{<}\,S\,{<}\,S_{c2}$, and stable vortex breakdown for $S\,{>}\,S_{c2}$, where $S_{c1}\,{=}\,0.6$ and $S_{c2}\,{=}\,0.88$.

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[1] Bed surface coarsening was found to be an important effect for the formation of ripples and the dynamics of the boundary layer above a predominantly silt-sized sediment bed (median particle size equal to 26 mm; $20% fine sand, 70% silt, 10% clay) under oscillatory flow (with orbital velocities of 0.32-0.52 m/s) in a laboratory wave duct. Following bed liquefaction, substantial winnowing of the bed surface occurred due to entrainment of finer material into suspension. Bed surface coarsening was quantified with micro-scale visualization using a CCD (charged-coupled device) camera. Under most wave orbital velocities investigated, the coarse surface particles were mobilized as a nearbed transport layer approximately 4 grain-diameters thick. The transport of these coarse sediments ultimately produced suborbital or anorbital ripples on the bed, except for the highest orbital velocities considered where the bed was planar. Micro-scale visualizations were used to construct a maximum (particle) velocity profile extending through the near-bed transport layers using particle-streak velocimetry (PSV). These profiles had a distinctive kink in log linear space at the height of the transport layer, suggesting that the near-bed sediment transport reduced skin friction and contributed to the boundary roughness through extraction of momentum.