Peristaltic transport of rheological fluid:model for movement of food bolus through esophagus

Fluid mechanical peristaltic transport through esophagus is studied in the paper. A mathematical model has been developed to study the peristaltic transport of a rheological fluid for arbitrary wave shapes and tube lengths. The Ostwald-de Waele power law of a viscous fluid is considered here to depict the non-Newtonian behaviour of the fluid. The model is formulated and analyzed specifically to explore some important information concerning the movement of food bolus through esophagus. The analysis is carried out by using the lubrication theory. The study is particularly suitable for the cases where the Reynolds number is small. The esophagus is treated as a circular tube through which the transport of food bolus takes place by periodic contraction of the esophageal wall. Variation of different variables concerned with the transport phenomena such as pressure, flow velocities, particle trajectory, and reflux is investigated for a single wave as well as a train of periodic peristaltic waves. The locally variable pressure is seen to be highly sensitive to the flow index ＂n＂. The study clearly shows that continuous fluid transport for Newtonian/rheological fluids by wave train propagation is more effective than widely spaced single wave propagation in the case of peristaltic movement of food bolus in the esophagus.

Rheological fluid motion in tube by metachronal waves of cilia

This paper presents a theoretical study of a non-linear rheological fluid transport in an axisymmetric tube by cilia. An attempt has been made to explain the role of cilia motion in the transport of fluid through the ductus efferent of the male reproductive tract. The Ostwald-de Waele power-law viscous fluid is considered to represent the rheological fluid. We analyze pumping by means of a sequence of cilia beats from rowto-row of cilia in a given row of cells and from one row of cells to the next(metachronal wave movement). For this purpose, we consider the conditions that the corresponding Reynolds number is small enough for inertial effects to be negligible, and the wavelengthto-diameter ratio is large enough so that the pressure can be considered uniform over the cross section. Analyses and computations of the fluid motion reveal that the time-average flow rate depends on ε, a non-dimensional measure involving the mean radius a of the tube and the cilia length. Thus, the flow rate significantly varies with the cilia length.Moreover, the flow rate has been reported to be close to the estimated value 6 × 10ml/h for human efferent ducts if ε is near 0.4. The estimated value was suggested by Lardner and Shack(Lardner, T. J. and Shack, W. J. Cilia transport. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 34, 325–335(1972)) for human based on the experimental observations of flow rates in efferent ducts of other animals, e.g., rat, ram, and bull. In addition, the nature of the rheological fluid, i.e., the value of the fluid index n strongly influences various flow-governed characteristics. An interesting feature of this paper is that the pumping improves the thickening behavior for small values of ε or in free pumping(?P = 0) and pumping(?P > 0) regions.