Waves in an elastic tube filled with a heterogeneous fluid of variable viscosity

By treating the artery as a prestressed thin elastic tube and the blood as an incompressible heterogeneous fluid with variable viscosity, we studied the propagation of weakly non-linear waves in such a composite medium through the use of reductive perturbation method. By assuming a variable density and a variable viscosity for blood in the radial direction we obtained the perturbed Korteweg-deVries equation as the evolution equation when the viscosity is of order of ε^3/2. We observed that the perturbed character is the combined result of the viscosity and the heterogeneity of the blood. A progressive wave type of solution is presented for the evolution equation and the result is discussed. The numerical results indicate that for a certain value of the density parameter sigma, the wave equation loses its dispersive character and the evolution equation degenerates. It is further shown that, for the perturbed KdV equation both the amplitude and the wave speed decay in the time parameter τ.