A weakly nonlinear stability analysis of shear flows based on amplitude expansion is re-examined. While it has been known that the condition required to define the coefficients of the resulting Stuart-Landau series representing the nonlinear temporal evolution of the most amplified Fourier component of a disturbance is not unique, we show that it can be formulated in a flexible generic form that incorporates different conditions used by various authors previously. The new formulation is interpreted from the point of view of low-dimensional projection of a full solution of a problem onto the space spanned by the basic flow vector and the eigenvector of the linearized problem. It is rigorously proven that the generalized condition formulated in this work reduces to a standard solvability condition at the critical point, where the basic flow first becomes unstable with respect to infinitesimal disturbances, and that it results in a well-posed problem for the determination of coefficients of Stuart-Landau series both at the critical point and a finite distance away from it. On a practical side, the generalized condition reported here enables one to choose the projection in such a way that the resulting low-dimensional approximate solution emphasizes specific physical features of interest via selecting the appropriate projection weight matrix without changing the overall asymptotic expansion procedure.
Keywords: Landau constants; amplitude expansion; low-dimensional projection.