Well-posedness, ill-posedness, and traveling waves for models of pulsatile flow in viscoelastic vessels

Abstract

We study dispersive models of fluid flow in viscoelastic vessels, derived in the study of blood flow. The unknowns in the models are the velocity of the fluid in the axial direction and the displacement of the vessel wall from rest. We prove that one such model has a well-posed initial value problem, while we argue that a related model instead has an ill-posed initial value problem; in the second case, we still prove the existence of solutions in analytic function spaces. Finally we prove the existence of some periodic traveling waves.