EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF NOISE PRODUCED BY STEADY FLOW THROUGH A SIMULATED VASCULAR STENOSIS

An in vitro experiment is carried out in order to study the acoustic effects of a vascular constriction (stenosis) in people and provide correlations between these effects and parameters relevant to the hydrodynamic and acoustic processes. For this purpose, we measure the sound produced when water flows through an elastic tube which is either unobstructed or contains a rigid axisymmetric constriction. The sound is measured at the outside of a large annular container filled with water and bounded at the inside by the coaxial elastic tube. The analysis of the acoustic fields shows that a stenosis has two basic acoustic effects. These are a general increase in the sound level and the production of a number of additional distinct peaks (new frequency components) in the acoustic power spectrum. The frequencies of these peaks are close to the characteristic frequencies of vortex formation in the disturbed flow region behind a stenosis and the resonance frequencies of vibration of the post-stenotic segment of the tube. Another important result is that the stenosis generated acoustic power is approximately proportional to the fourth power of the stenosis severity and the same power of the flow Reynolds number.