Blood Flow Through a Circular Pipe With an Impulsive Pressure Gradient

The unsteady flow of a viscoelastic fluid in a straight, long, rigid pipe, driven by a suddenly imposed pressure gradient is studied. The used model is the Oldroyd-B fluid modified with the use of a nonconstant viscosity, which includes the effect of the shear-thinning of many fluids. The main application considered is in blood flow. Two coupled nonlinear equations are solved by a spectral collocation method in space and the implicit trapezoidal finite difference method in time. The presented results show the role of the non-Newtonian terms in unsteady phenomena.