The purpose of this paper is to provide some possible explantions for certain observed phenomena associated with the mean-velocity profile of a turbulent boundary layer which undergoes a rapid yawing. For the cases considered the yawing is caused by an obstruction attached to the wall upon which the boundary layer is developing. Only incompressible flow is considered.

§1 of the paper is concerned with the outer region of the boundary layer and deals with a phenomenon observed by Johnston (1960) who described it with his triangular model for the polar plot of the velocity distribution. This was also observed by Hornung & Joubert (1963). It is shown here by a first-approximation analysis that such a behaviour is mainly a consequence of the geometry of the apparatus used. The analysis also indicates that, for these geometries, the outer part of the boundary-layer profile can be described by a single vector-similarity defect law rather than the vector ‘wall-wake’ model proposed by Coles (1956). The former model agrees well with the experimental results of Hornung & Joubert.

In §2, the flow close to the wall is considered. Treating this region as an equilibrium layer and using similarity arguments, a three-dimensional version of the ‘law of the wall’ is derived. This relates the mean-velocity-vector distribution with the pressure-gradient vector and wall-shear-stress vector and explains how the profile skews near the wall. The theory is compared with Hornung & Joubert's experimental results. However at this stage the results are inconclusive because of the lack of a sufficient number of measured quantities.