Biorheological Model on Flow of Herschel-Bulkley Fluid through a Tapered Arterial Stenosis with Dilatation

Abstract

An analysis of blood flow through a tapered artery with stenosis and dilatation has been carried out where the blood is treated as incompressible Herschel-Bulkley fluid. A comparison between numerical values and analytical values of pressure gradient at the midpoint of stenotic region shows that the analytical expression for pressure gradient works well for the values of yield stress till 2.4. The wall shear stress and flow resistance increase significantly with axial distance and the increase is more in the case of converging tapered artery. A comparison study of velocity profiles, wall shear stress, and flow resistance for Newtonian, power law, Bingham-plastic, and Herschel-Bulkley fluids shows that the variation is greater for Herschel-Bulkley fluid than the other fluids. The obtained velocity profiles have been compared with the experimental data and it is observed that blood behaves like a Herschel-Bulkley fluid rather than power law, Bingham, and Newtonian fluids. It is observed that, in the case of a tapered stenosed tube, the streamline pattern follows a convex pattern when we move from r/R=0 to r/R=1 and it follows a concave pattern when we move from r/R=0 to r/R=-1. Further, it is of opposite behaviour in the case of a tapered dilatation tube which forms new information that is, for the first time, added to the literature.