Two-layered micropolar fluid flow through stenosed artery: Effect of peripheral layer thickness

An unsteady analysis of a two-layered blood flow through a flexible artery under stenotic conditions has been carried out in the present study where the flowing blood is represented by the two-fluid model, consisting of a core region of suspension of all erythrocytes assumed to be Eringen's micropolar fluid and a plasma layer free from cells of any kind as a Newtonian fluid. The artery has been treated as an elastic (moving wall) cylindrical tube. The equations governing the unsteady flow mechanism subject to pulsatile pressure gradient, has been solved numerically using finite difference scheme by exploiting the appropriate physically realistic prescribed conditions. An extensive quantitative analysis has been performed through numerical computations in order to estimate the effect of different micropolar fluid parameters and the Reynolds number on the flow velocity, the flux, the resistive impedance and the wall shear stress together with their dependencies with time, the input pressure gradient and the severity of the stenosis. The graphical representations of these results do illustrate the flow characteristics of blood under stenotic conditions with proper scientific reasoning and hence validate the applicability of the model under consideration. Special emphasis has duly been made to compare the present theoretical results with the existing ones including experimental results and good agreement between them has been achieved both qualitatively and quantitatively. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.