Weakly nonlinear waves in a linearly tapered elastic tube filled with a fluid

In the present work, treating the arteries as a tapered, thin-walled, long and circularly conical prestressed elastic tube and using the long-wave approximation, we have studied the propagation of weakly nonlinear waves in such a fluid-filled elastic tube by employing the reductive perturbation method. By considering the blood as an incompressible inviscid fluid the evolution equation is obtained as the Korteweg-de Vries equation with a variable coefficient. It is shown that this type of equations admits a solitary wave type of solution with variable wave speed. It is observed that the wave speed increases with the scaled time parameter τ for positive tapering while it decreases for negative tapering, as expected.