Copyright © 2012 D. S. Sankar and Atulya K. Nagar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Pulsatile flow of blood in constricted narrow arteries under periodic body acceleration is analyzed, modeling blood as non-Newtonian fluid models with yield stress such as (i) Herschel-Bulkley fluid model and (ii) Casson fluid model. The expressions for various flow quantities obtained by Sankar and Ismail (2010) for Herschel-Bulkley fluid model and Nagarani and Sarojamma (2008), in an improved form, for Casson fluid model are used to compute the data for comparing these fluid models. It is found that the plug core radius and wall shear stress are lower for H-B fluid model than those of the Casson fluid model. It is also noted that the plug flow velocity and flow rate are considerably higher for H-B fluid than those of the Casson fluid model. The estimates of the mean velocity and mean flow rate are considerably higher for H-B fluid model than those of the Casson fluid model.