Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2011
We consider a cylinder with arbitrary cross section moving in a viscous incompressible fluid parallel to a plane wall. Formal asymptotic expansions of the solution for small Reynolds numbers are constructed by using boundary integral equations of the first kind. In contrast to the problem without a wall, we show that there exists a unique solution to the zeroth order problem. However, the problem considered here is still singular in the sense that we find the Stokes paradox in the next higher order problem. A justification of the formal asymptotic expansion for the first two terms is established rigorously.