A rotating cylinder in a stream produces a circulation which is regarded as the cause of the Magnus force. The problem is to find the dependence of the circulation on the rotational speed of the cylinder. This question is treated in the present report for a stationary flow about a circular cylinder with the axis perpendicular to the direction of the stream under the assumption that the flow in the boundary layer is laminar. Two approximate methods are used for the calculation of the boundary layer. One is due to Burgers and the other is an adaptation of the Polhusend method. In the case of only one stagnation line on the surface of the cylinder the boundary layer is evaluation numerically, the profiles and the shearing stress computer.

Two-dimensional subcritical flow past a rotating cylinder has been theoretically treated to obtain agreement with the boundary-layer calculations. This study combined a source-wake bound-vortex flow model with a moving-wall boundary-layer calculation to force the final inviscid-flow model to be consistent with boundary-layer theory. Consistency was obtained by an iterative process whereby the separation points of the inviscid-flow model converged toward the separation points found by boundary-layer calculations. The boundary-layer is calculated using the integral-momentum and the integral-energy equations where the family of moving-wall similarity boundary-layer solutions provide relationships between some parameters of the equations.