Frictionless flows with finite voticity are usually made determinate by the imposition of boundary conditions specifying the distribution of vorticity ‘at infinity’. No such boundary conditions are available in the case of flows with closed streamlines, and the velocity distributions in regions where viscous forces are small (the Reynolds number of the flow being assumed large) cannot be made determinate by considerations of the fluid as inviscid. It is shown that if the motion is to be exactly steady there is an integral condition, arising from the existence of viscous forces, which must be satisfied by the vorticity distribution no matter how small the viscosity may be. This condition states that the contribution from viscous forces to the rate of change of circulation round any streamline must be identically zero. (In cases in which the vortex lines are also closed, there is a similar condition concerning the circulation round vortex lines.)

The inviscid flow equations are then combined with this integral condition in cases for which typical streamlines lie entirely in the region of small viscous forces. In two-dimensional closed flows, the vorticity is found to be uniform in a connected region of small viscous forces, with a value which remains to be determined—as is done explicitly in one simple case—by the condition that the viscous boundary layer surrounding this region must also be in steady motion. Analogous results are obtained for rotationally symmetric flows without azimuthal swirl, and for a certain class of flows with swirl having no interior boundary to the streamlines in an axial plane, the latter case requiring use of the fact that the vortex lines are also closed. In all these cases, the results are such that the Bernoulli constant, or ‘total head’, varies linearly with the appropriate stream function, and the effect of viscosity on the rate of change of vorticity at any point vanishes identically.