Solitary waves in a fluid-filled thin elastic tube with variable cross-section

The present work treats the arteries as a thin walled prestressed elastic tube with variable cross-section and uses the longwave approximation to study the propagation of weakly nonlinear waves in such a fluid-filled elastic tube by employing the reductive perturbation method. By considering the blood as an incompressible inviscid fluid, the evolution equation is obtained as the Korteweg-de Vries equation with a variable coefficient. It is shown that this type of equations admits a solitary wave type of solution with variable wave speed. It is observed that, for soft biological tissues with an exponential strain energy function the wave speed increases with distance for narrowing tubes while it decreases for expanding tubes. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.