Weakly nonlinear waves in a viscous fluid contained in a viscoelastic tube with variable cross-section

In the present work, treating the arteries as a thin walled prestressed viscoelastic tube with variable cross-section, and using the longwave approximation, we have studied the propagation of weakly nonlinear waves in such a fluid-filled viscoelastic tube by employing the reductive perturbation method. By considering the blood as an incompressible viscous fluid, depending on the order of various physical entities, various evolution equations with variable coefficients are obtained and progressive wave solutions to these evolution equations are given whenever possible. It is shown that this type of equations admit solitary wave type of solutions with variable wave speeds. © 2005 Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.