Biomedical Engineering: Bridging Medicine and Technology 1st Edition by Veronique Tran,Mark Saltzman

Exercise 7

Examine one of the consequences of branching with a simple model shown in the figure. Assume that there are two blood-flow circuits, which are identical except that one of the circuits has a single vessel, whereas the other has two identical vessels in parallel.
a. If the resistance of a single vessel is R, what is the overall resistance of the two vessels in parallel?
b. If each of the circuits carries the same flow rate, which has the larger pressure drop? How do the two pressure drops compare?