Effect of Catheters on Blood Flow and Heat Transfer in Stenotic Arteries with Thrombosis

In the human cardiovascular system, the flow of fluid through blood vessels is important in many biological and biomedical fields. Stenosis & thrombosis are vascular disorders that can block many blood vessels. To clear constrictions in an artery, various types of catheters are used, which generate frictional forces between the clot's wall and the catheter. This paper presents an analysis of blood flow and heat transfer during the initial phase of axisymmetric stenosis and thrombosis in a vessel containing a catheter. Blood's rheological behaviour is described by a non-Newtonian K-L fluid model. In the proposed model, the nonlinear momentum equation is simplified under various assumptions to find an analytical solution. Exact solutions are obtained using boundary conditions. The novelty of this work is that the velocity & temperature profile has not yet been analysed in conjunction with stenosis, thrombosis, and catheter presence, using the non-Newtonian K-L fluid model. An explicit expression for velocity, temperature, and flow resistance has been obtained. The obtained results have been shown for flow characteristics through graphs for various values of stenosis height, clot height, plasma viscosity, and different catheter radii. The highest velocity is found at the centre and diminishes at the wall. Velocity decreases as the constriction height increases. It is observed that using a larger radius catheter, velocity quickly decreases in the core compared with the central region due to the narrowing of the flow passage area. The temperature of the fluid increases in a stenotic artery with thrombosis in the presence of the catheter, and also increases as the radius of the catheter increases.