Global solution to a hyperbolic problem arising in the modeling of blood flow in circulatory systems

This paper considers a system of first-order, hyperbolic, partial differential equations in the domain of a one-dimensional network. The system models the blood flow in human circulatory systems as an initialboundary- value problem with boundary conditions of either algebraic or differential type. The differential equations are nonhomogeneous with frictional damping terms and the state variables are coupled at internal junctions. The existence and uniqueness of the local classical solution have been established in our earlier work [W. Ruan, M.E. Clark, M. Zhao, A. Curcio, A hyperbolic system of equations of blood flow in an arterial network, J. Appl. Math. 64 (2) (2003) 637–667; W. Ruan, M.E. Clark, M. Zhao, A. Curcio, Blood flow in a network, Nonlinear Anal. Real World Appl. 5 (2004) 463–485; W. Ruan, M.E. Clark, M. Zhao, A. Curcio, A quasilinear hyperbolic system that models blood flow in a network, in: Charles V. Benton (Ed.), Focus on Mathematical Physics Research, Nova Science Publishers, Inc., New York, 2004, pp. 203–230]. This paper continues the analysis and gives sufficient conditions for the global existence of the classical solution.We prove that the solution exists globally if the boundary data satisfy the dissipative condition (2.3) or (3.2), and the norms of the initial and forcing functions in a certain Sobolev space are sufficiently small. This is only the first step toward establishing the global existence of the solution to physiologically realistic models, because, in general, the chosen dissipative conditions (2.3) and (3.2) do not appear to hold for the originally proposed boundary conditions (1.3)–(1.12). © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.