Effect of heat and mass transfer on non-Newtonian flow – Links to atherosclerosis

The present investigation deals with a mathematical model representing the dynamic response of heat and mass transfer to blood streaming through the arteries under stenotic condition. The blood is treated to be a generalized Newtonian fluid and the arterial wall is considered to be rigid having differently shaped stenoses in its lumen arising from various types of abnormal growth or plaque formation. The nonlinear unsteady pulsatile flow phenomenon unaffected by the concentration-field of the macromolecules is governed by the Navier–Stokes equations together with the equation of continuity while those of the heat and the mass transfers are controlled by the heat conduction and the convection–diffusion equations, respectively. The governing equations of motion accompanied by the appropriate choice of the boundary conditions are solved numerically by Marker and Cell (MAC) method in order to compute the physiologically significant quantities with desired degree of accuracy. The necessary checking for numerical stability has been incorporated in the algorithm for better precision of the results computed. The quantitative analysis carried out finally includes the respective profiles of the flow-field, the temperature and the mass concentration along with their individual distributions over the entire arterial segment as well. The key factors like the wall shear stress and the Sherwood number are also examined for further qualitative insight into the heat flow and mass transport phenomena through arterial stenosis. The present results show quite consistency with several existing results in the literature which substantiate sufficiently to validate the applicability of the model under consideration.