Copyright © 2009 D. S. Sankar and Ahmad Izani Md. Ismail. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The pulsatile flow of blood through stenosed arteries is analyzed by assuming the blood as a two-fluid model with the suspension of all the erythrocytes in the core region as a non-Newtonian fluid and the plasma in the peripheral layer as a Newtonian fluid. The non-Newtonian fluid in the core region of the artery is assumed as a (i) Herschel-Bulkley fluid and (ii) Casson fluid. Perturbation method is used to solve the resulting system of non-linear partial differential equations. Expressions for various flow quantities are obtained for the two-fluid Casson model. Expressions of the flow quantities obtained by Sankar and Lee (2006) for the two-fluid Herschel-Bulkley model are used to get the data for comparison. It is found that the plug flow velocity and velocity distribution of the two-fluid Casson model are considerably higher than those of the two-fluid Herschel-Bulkley model. It is also observed that the pressure drop, plug core radius, wall shear stress and the resistance to flow are significantly very low for the two-fluid Casson model than those of the two-fluid Herschel-Bulkley model. Hence, the two-fluid Casson model would be more useful than the two-fluid Herschel-Bulkley model to analyze the blood flow through stenosed arteries.