In this work, steady flow-field and heat transfer through a copper-water nanofluid around a rotating circular cylinder with a constant nondimensional rotation rate α varying from 0 to 5 was investigated for Reynolds numbers of 5–40. Furthermore, the range of nanoparticle volume fractions considered is 0–5%. The effect of volume fraction of nanoparticles on the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics are carried out by using a finite-volume method based commercial computational fluid dynamics solver. The variation of the local and the average Nusselt numbers with Reynolds number, volume fractions, and rotation rate are presented for the range of conditions. The average Nusselt number is found to decrease with increasing value of the rotation rate for the fixed value of the Reynolds number and volume fraction of nanoparticles. In addition, rotation can be used as a drag reduction technique.