The effect of a bump on wave propagation in a fluid-filled elastic tube

In the present work, treating the arteries as a thin walled prestressed elastic tube with variable cross-section, and using the longwave approximation, we have studied 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 viscous fluid the evolution equation is obtained as the perturbed Korteweg-de Vries equation with variable coefficients. It is shown that this type of equations admit a solitary wave type of solution with variable wave speed. It is observed that, the wave speed gets smaller and smaller as we go away from the center of the bump. The wave speed reaches to its maximum value at the center of the bump. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.